
.ND HIS WORK 



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TELLA S. CENTER 




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THE WORKER AND HIS WORK 



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FLOL'R MILLS, MINNEAPOLIS. BY JOSEPH PENNELL 



FLOUR MILLS, MINNEAPOLIS 

The mills of Minneapolis are as impressive as the cathedrals of France. There are places 
on the river where they group themselves into the same compositions, with the bridges 
below them, that I found years ago at Abli — only the color is different; the rosy red of the 
Frejich brick is changed to dull concrete gray. The tree masses below are the same, and 
the old stone railroad bridge over the Mississippi is just as drawable as that over the Tarn. 
The beauty of the flour mills is the beauty of use — they carry out William Morris's theory 
that "everything useful should be beautiful" — but I don't know what he would have 
said of them. There are other subjects which recall Tivoli, where the streams, gush out 
from the bluffs or tremble and rush and roar from dark caverns between the huge modern 
masses of masonry as finely as they do in far-away Italy. Those were the shrines of the 
gods — these are the temples of work, the temples of our time. 



LIPPINCOTT'S SCHOOL TEXT SERIES 

EDITED BY WILLIAM F. RUSSELL, Ph.D. 

DEAN, COLLEGE OF EDUCATION, STATE UNIVERSITY OF IOWA 



THE WORKER AND 
HIS WORK 

READINGS IN PRESENT-DAY LITERATURE PRESENT- 
ING SOME OF THE ACTIVITIES BY WHICH MEN 
AND WOMEN THE WORLD OVER MAKE A LIVING 



COMPILED BY 

STELLA STEWART CENTER 

A.B. GEORGE PEABODY COLLEGE; A.M. COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY; INSTRUCTOR IN ENGLISH, 

JULIA RICHMAN HIGH SCHOOL, NEW YORK; INSTRUCTOR IN SECRETARIAL 

CORRESPONDENCE, COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 



' In the handiwork of their craft is their prayer " 



ILLUSTRATED 




PHILADELPHIA AND LONDON 
J. B. LIPPINCOTT COMPANY 



.ep^ 



%^^ 



COPYRIGHT, 1920, BY J. B. LIPPINCOTT COMPANY 



PRINTED BY J. B. LIPPINCOTT COMPANY 

AT THE WASHINGTON SQUARE PRESS 

PHILADELPHIA, U. S. A. 

©CI,A565801 
m -5 1920 



FOREWORD 

To my colleagues who concern themselves with the significant 
work of helping young people to find their true vocations: 

This book has been compiled in an effort to meet the needs of 
boys and girls who feel the urgent necessity of selecting the right 
vocation. Few subjects provoke so keen an interest as that of one's 
life work. " The thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts." But 
there is danger in early selection and specialization before there is 
perspective. To be a vocational misfit is almost as tragic as to have 
no work at all. 

Two dangers have confronted the world of education: the danger 
of the narrow commercial or industrial training that looks for quick 
returns and tends to convert vocation into a blind alley instead of an 
open door; and the danger of the so-called cultural, academic educa- 
tion that leaves vocation to accident and chance. Any system of 
education fails that does not include the philosophy, the perspective, 
the vision of the humanist, and at the same time the technical effi- 
ciency that contends successfully with immediate facts, details, rou- 
tine. We need a " curriculum of Modernities as well as a curriculum 
of Humanities." 

Literature is most valuable in giving the student an insight into 
vocational activities. There is hardly any field of man's work but 
the man of letters has made it his own. There is a great mass of 
unimaginative, expository composition, written by well-intentioned 
authors, setting forth outlines of world industries. Such material is 
purposely excluded here, even from the bibliography, for such reading 
has its place only after the interest in a particular vocation has been 
aroused, and that interest can be quickened only by real literature — 
literature that portrays the souls of occupations as well as of the 
men who follow them. 

The selections included in this volume do not aim primarily to 
convey knowledge of facts or processes, but to emphasize the human, 
social aspect of work, and to interpret it in its vital relations. They 
have the atmosphere of human philosophy, a sense of warm human 
relationships, qualities that will bring about a good understanding 

3 



4 FOREWORD 

between the theorist cloistered in academic seclusion and the man 
who to his " hot and constant task is heroically true." 

In the next place, the selections are taken from the works of 
present-day writers. Many educators agree that contemporary 
literature is not sufficiently represented in the school curriculum, 
and that students select their reading from contemporary writers 
without guiding criticism. A great effort is being made to have the 
literature of the class-room a faithful transcript of the complex life 
on the other side of the school-room walls. In other words, it has 
been strongly felt that the literature curriculum should keep pace 
with social evolution, even with the last phase of that evolution. 

Then, too, it has seemed advisable to include a variety of literary 
types and composition, such as thrilling narrative, graphic descrip- 
tion, the lyric outburst, the bit of essay as alluring as the winding 
road — all necessary to portray man at his work. 

The selections exclude for the most part those activities con- 
nected with the so-called fine arts and professional life, not because 
they are not a part of the world's work, but because justice demands 
that due recognition be given the worker who labors in the industrial, 
commercial, and occupational activities of life, with his hand as well 
as with his head. The great need of society is for the laborer to 
appreciate himself and to be appreciated by those who are not in the 
popular sense toilers. 

The reading of literature about work should lead to composition 
of the best type — that based on close observation of the kinds of 
work done in the student's environment. Thus a style that is direct 
and concrete will be developed, suitable for the average practical 
demands of life. The selections deal with various sections of the 
United States, in response to the demand that students should have 
the opportunity of seeing local activities in literary perspective. The 
occupations and industries of other countries are also represented, 
to encourage the student to think in terms of the world. So the text 
has a wide geographical range, in an effort to supplement the paro- 
chial and sectional point of view with the national and international. 

That literature, particularly novels, which has acute economic 
crises for a background has been relegated to the bibliography. Such 
reading is peculiarly sombre and depressing; and the ambitious 
student will select judiciously what suits his needs. The text on 
the whole is meant to express the sane, wholesome content that 



FOREWORD 5 

comes only when one performs to the best of his ability some piece 
of the necessary work of the world. Work, because it is creative, 
is inherently cheerful, and young people will miss much of the joy of 
life if they do not learn to work cheerfully. 

A text on the subject of work has a place in all schools, regard- 
less of their classifications, whether commercial, or academic, or 
technical, or industrial, for the basis of life is work, and the language 
of occupations should need no interpreter. Such literature seems 
the essential core of the English curriculum, to which must be added 
the literature of aesthetic delight. ^-^ z^ ~ 

New York, November, 19 19. 



ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 

For the use of copyrighted material the author extends grateful 
acknowledgment to the following publishers and authors: The 
Curtis Publishing Company for Shipping y by Archie Austin Coates; 
the American Magazine for The Man Within Him, by Edna Ferber; 
Angela Morgan for Work: a Song of Triumph; the Book Supply 
Company for selections from The Winning of Barbara Worth, by 
Harold Bell Wright; The Touchstone for Nora, by Elizabeth West 
Parker; Doubleday Page and Company for selections from The Four 
Million, by William Sidney Porter, The Pit, by Frank Norris, 
Blazed Trail Stories, by Stewart Edward White, and Cappy Ricks, 
by Peter B. Kyne; the Outlook Company for Sap-Time, by Eliza- 
beth Woodbridge; D. Appleton and Company for selections from 
The Cruise of the Cachalot, by Frank T. Bullen, and Cape Cod 
Ballads, by Joseph C. Lincoln; Charles Scribner^s Sons for The 
Open Hearth, by Herschel S. Hall, Work, by Henry van Dyke, and 
the selections from Kipps, by Herbert George Wells; Frederick A. 
Stokes Company for selections from Fanny Herself, by Edna Ferber, 
and Cotton as a World Power, by James A. B. Scherer; the Saalfield 
Publishing Company for the selection from The Delights of Delicate 
Eating, by Elizabeth R. Pennell; Harper and Brothers for the selec- 
tions from Your United States, by Arnold Bennett, The Silver Horde, 
by Rex Beach, The Iron Woman, by Margaret Deland; The Woman 
and Her Bonds, from Wall Street Stories, by Edwin Lefevre; 
Dodd, Mead and Company for the selection from The Life of the Bee, 
by Maurice Maeterlinck; the Independent for the diagram by Henry 
J. Fischer. The selections from Brunei's Tower and Old Delabole, 
by Eden Phillpotts, from A Step-Daughter of the Prairie, by Margaret 
Lynn, from The Business of Being a Woman, by Ida M. Tarbell, 
and from A Son of the Middle Border, by Hamlin Garland, are used 
by permission of, and special arrangement with, the Macmillan Com- 
pany, Publishers. The selections from the works of Henry Sydnor 
Harrison and Nathaniel Hawthorne are used by permission of, and 
special arrangement with, Houghton, Mifflin Company, the author- 
ized publishers of their works. Acknowledgment of other copy- 

7 



8 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 

righted material is made in comiection with the selections in the man- 
ner prescribed by the publishers. Grateful acknowledgment is also 
made to Mr. Joseph Pennell for the privilege of reproducing three 
of his drawings with the accompanying legends; to the Metropolitan 
Museum for Rodin's Thinker, and to Avery Library, Columbia Uni- 
versity, for generous permission to photograph the reproductions of 
the works of Constantin Meunier in Etudes sur Quelqties Artistes 
Originaux — Constantin Meunier^ by Camille Lemounier, and also 
Le MiUrteleur in bronze. 

For most of the biographical data the editor is indebted to 
Who's Who. 

In addition, the editor wishes to express her sincere thanks to her 
colleagues and friends whose generous assistance and advice have 
made the assembling of this book a pleasure. 

The Editor. 



CONTENTS 



PAGB 

Introduction 17 

Work Henry van Dyke 36 

From Poems 

Work: A Song of Triumph Angela Morgan 37 

From The Hour Has Struck 

Keep on Working Richard Eugene Burton 39 

From Little Essays in Literature and Life 

The Mail-Order House Arnold Bennett 42 

From Your United States 

The American Telephone Arnold Bennett 46 

From Your United States 

The Telephone Directory Berton Braley 50 

From Songs of A Workaday World 

Sparks of the Wireless Walter Sanders Hiatt 51 

From Scrihner's Magazine, April, 19 14 

Fanny Herself Edna Ferber 64 

From Fanny Herself 

The Emporium Herbert George Wells 72 

From Kipps 

The Romance of a Busy Broker O. Henry 77 

From The Four Million 

The Woman and Her Bonds Edwin Lefevre 81 

From Wall Street Stories 

The Wheat Pit Frank Norris 96 

From The Pit 

TbE Man Within Him Edna Ferber 108 

From The American Magazine, June, 191 4 

A Potter's Wheel Eden Phillpotts 124 

From Brunei's Tower 

The Riverman Stewart Edward White 131 

From Blazed Trail Stories 

The Toll of Big Timber Bertrand William Sinclair 141 

From Big Timber 

Cotton and the Old South James A. B. Scherer 147 

From Cotton a World Power 

The Cotton Picker Carl Holliday 151 

From The Cotton Picker and Other Poems 

9 



10 CONTENTS 

An Apiary Maurice Maeterlinck 152 

From The Life of the Bee 

Sap Time Elisabeth Woodbridge 153 

From The Outlook, January 31, 191 4 

The Red Cow and Her Friends Peter McArthur 165 

I. The Gobler. II. His Troubles. III. Human Nature in Dumb 

Creatures. IV. Cow Character. V. Calf Exuberance. 
From The Red Cow and Her Friends 

The Last Threshing in the Coulee Hamlin Garland 170 

From A Son of the Middle Border 

The Power Plant Berton Braley 176 

From Songs of a Workaday World 

The Open Hearth Herschel S. Hall 178 

From Scrihner's Magazine, April, 19 19 

The Iron Woman Margaret Deland 192 

From The Iron Woman 

Cigar-making Henry Sydnor Harrison 199 

From V. V's Eyes 

A Printing-Office Arnold Bennett 208 

From The Clayhanger 

In The Quarries Eden Phillpotts 218 

From Old Delabole 

The Incomparable Onion Elizabeth Robins Pennell 230 

From The Delights of Delicate Eating 

Sweet Day of Rest Eliza Calvert Hall 237 

From Aunt Jane of Kentucky 

Ivy of the Negatives Margaret Lynn 247 

From A Step-daughter of the Prairie 

Hymn to the Dairy Maids on Beacon Street . . Christopher Morley 260 
From Songs for a Little House 

Ellen Hanging Clothes Lizette Woodworth Reese 261 

From Contemporary Verse (Magazine) 

The Navajo Blanket Charles Fletcher Lummis 262 

From Some Strange Corners of Our Country 

Nora Elizabeth West Parker 268 

From The Touchstone (Magazine) 

The Woman and Her Raiment Ida Minerva Tarbell 270 

From The Business of Being a Woman 

Shipping Archie Austin Coates 277 

From The Saturday Evening Post, May 17, 19 17 

Unexpected Developments Peter Bernard Kyne 278 

From Cappy Ricks 

The Cod-Fisher Joseph Crosby Lincoln 292 

From Cape Cod Ballads 



CONTENTS 11 

Abner's Whale Frank Thomas Bullen 294 

From The Cruise of the Cachalot 

The Salmon ." Rex Beach 306 

From The Silver Horde 

Reclaiming The Desert Harold Bell Wright 311 

From The Winning of Barbara Worth 

The Child-man Arnold Bennett 322 

From Clayhanger 

The "Red-Ink Squad" Harvey Jerrold O'Higgins 327. 

From The Smoke-Eaters 

The Thinker Berton Braley 339 

From Songs of a Workaday World 

Bibliography 340 

Who's Who 345 



ILLUSTRATIONS 



PACE 



Flour Mills, Minneapolis (Pennell) Frontispiece 

Carrier (Meunier) 40 

Le Marteleur (Meunier) 70 

La Moisson (Meunier) 106 

L'Abreuvoir (Meunier) 150 

Mineur au travail (Meunier) 164 

Pittsburgh (Pennell) 176 

Mineurs Retour du Travail (Meunier) 190 

Portefaix (Meunier) 260 

Work (Meunier) 276 

Approach to Duluth (Pennell) 320 

The Thinker (Rodin) 338 



TO THE STUDENT 

Dear Students of this Book: 

The purpose of The Worker and His Work is to introduce you to 
the varied activities by which men and women the world over make 
a living. Every one should contribute something to society, for which 
society in turn pays him money. It may be services which he renders 
or some commodity he sells. But whatever he has " for sale " should 
be worthy of him. The question, then, of one's vocation is basic, 
for the vocation and the income from it determine one's associates, 
one's leisure, recreation, and progress. Some vocations are " blind 
alleys" and so lead nowhere; others offer endless opportunities for 
increased income, promotion, pleasure, and culture. So, the matter 
of one's business in life should occupy a large part of one's thoughts. 

If you wish to get the greatest profit from the reading of this 
book, begin with the bibliography and get the " lay of the land," as 
all travelers try to do first in an unexplored field. The easiest way 
to do this is to divide your class into groups and let each group read 
a certain number of works in the bibliography and classify them as 
to form and content. 

The following suggestions may aid you in making the classification: 

I. Is the work an essay, novel, short story, letter, or poem? 
II. What vocation is portrayed in the work? 

1. Farm work. 

2. Household work. 

3. Mining. 

a. Quarrymg. 

4. Business. 

1. Department store. 

2. Mail-order house. 

3. Advertising. 

5. Crafts. 

1. Pottery. 

6. Lumbering. 

a. Forestry. 

15 



16 TO THE STUDENT 

7. Fishing. 

8. Printing. 

9. Civil-engineering. 

10. Seafaring life. 

11. Transportation and distribution. 
^ 12. Communication. 

13. Founding. 

14. Civil service. 

Other classifications will occur to you. 

As your fellow students make reports on their reading, record 
the classifications in your note-book. Then you are ready to read 
the selections. When you find a selection that you like, read the 
whole work from which it is taken, if it is a selection, and read all the 
works mentioned in the bibliography that treat of similar vocations. 
Perhaps you can add to the bibliography. After reading those works 
that give the spirit of the various vocations, read works on the sub- 
ject that give you detailed information. Find out where instruction 
in a given subject can be best obtained. Write to the school for a 
catalogue. Try to discover who are the leaders in the vocation of 
your choice. 

Such reference works as Who's Who and the Reader's Guide to 
Periodical Literature will be invaluable to you, for they give the most 
recent information. 

Even if you have decided on a vocation, an acquaintance with 
other workers will make you intelligent about the activities that 
carry on the world ^s work. 

With the hope that the reading of this book may help you in de- 
termining your own vocation, I am 

Yours sincerely, 



^^jUMjLo. ^^^r^L-^^ 



THE WORKER AND HIS WORK 

INTRODUCTION 

Art and Work. — The work of the world is one of its greatest 
facts, and " work done squarely, with unwasted days " challenges 
universal admiration. The creative quality inherent in work has 
inspired artists with some of their finest creations. All have paid 
their tribute to the man who " to his hot and constant task is hero- 
ically true"; art delights to honor the worker, whatever the scene 
of his activity may be — whether 

Forge or farm or mine or bench, 

Deck, altar, outpost lone; 
Mill, school, battalion, counter, trench, 

Rail, senate, sheepfold, throne. 

It is no curse to earn bread by the sweat of one's brow. The 
artist can find no better theme on which to spend himself than that 
of man's quest of a livelihood, whether he be a Meunier, singing with 
lyric fervor in bronze; or a Thomas Hood wailing The Song of the 
Shirt; or a Joseph Pennell, to whom a towering factory chimney is a 
twentieth century campanile, and a power-house as worthy of art 
as the Holy Grail. We fall easily under the spell of work. The 
" romance of labor," the " wonder of work " are current but not 
empty phrases. We see both romance and wonder, when the young 
engineer builds a bridge over the roaring Ganges; when the Cape 
Cod fisher " in his battered schooner leaps the long Atlantic swells "; 
when the Kentucky farmer upturns the soil for his hemp; when the 
adventurous lumberman makes inroads into the primeval forest; 
when the Wyoming shepherd tends his sheep in rural solitude; when 
the quarryman bores into caverns of slate; when the telephone 
operator annihilates distance with a system of plugs and currents. 
All these activities constitute the world's work, and all are of absorb- 
ing interest to every one. They are man's efforts to exist, and 
exist worthily. 

Literature and Work. — Great writers of all ages have cele- 
brated the world's work and glorified the sincere worker. They have 
2 17 



18 THE WORKER AND HIS WORK 

felt the soul of industries and occupations, and have made their 
readers feel it. Homer lingers lovingly over the careful workman- 
ship of the shield of Achilles; to Kipling, the locomotive .007 is a 
creature alive and pulsing; Longfellow, Phillpotts, Matthew Arnold, 
Browning, follow the transformation of a lump of clay on the potter's 
wheel until it is a graceful, uj>-springing vase, instinct with life; George 
Eliot puts into the mouth of Antonio Stradivarius the true philosophy 
of work: 

But God be praised, 

Antonio Stradivari has an eye 

That winces at false wdrk and loves the true ; 

With hand and arm that play upon the tool 

As willingly as any singing bird 

Sets him to sing his morning roundelay 

Because he likes to sing and likes the song. 

Arnold Bennett stands rapt in the cathedral gloom of a telephone 
exchange, " with its murmuring sound as of an infinity of scholars 
in a prim school ever conning their lessons"; Marion Crawford 
presents the work of a Venetian glass-blower, whose glass looked 
like the juice of the pomegranate. The spectacle of a man doing 
work that is proper to him and who is thus " at home with his own 
heart " arouses the man of letters to his happiest efforts. 

Dreams and Work. — ^This literary treatment of work and the 
worker " vivifies the common round," so that work is not a lifeless, 
mechanical routine. It encourages one to dream a little, to phil- 
osophize about one^s work, and so lift it to a plane of dignity where 
the worker is self-respecting. How charming a picture Elizabeth 
Browning presents in one of her sonnets! 

The woman singeth at her spinning wheel 
A pleasant chant, ballad, or barcarolle; 
She thinketh of her song, upon the whole, 
Far more than of her flax; and yet the reel 
Is full, and artfully her fingers feel 
With quick adjustment, provident control, 
The lines, too subtly twisted to unroll, 
Out to a perfect thread. 
And so 

Work may prove 

The better for the sweetness of the song. 



INTRODUCTION 19 

In referring to his Songs of Labor, Whittier expresses the wish that 
Haply from them the toiler, bent 

Above his forge or plough, may gain 
A manlier spirit of content. 

And feel that life is wisest spent, 
Where the strong working hand 

Makes strong the working brain. 

Work is the incidental, accidental thing that one may do — this 
to-day and that next year. The continuous thing is one's attitude, 
one's philosophy. At one extreme is the man who is doing the thing 
for which he is fitted by training and temperament and is thus find- 
ing his work an opportunity for self-expression. At the other extreme 
is the man who grinds out so much service in return for so much pay, 
with the minimum of thought about the work. The first gives his 
whole thought to the work, during working hours, and before and 
after; he is creating and inventing and growing constantly. His 
work is a pleasure and he understands the phrase, " the joy of work." 
On the other hand, a man may have the dull look of one who labors 
without interest or pleasure in the work. The two workers may do 
the same thing, and yet one sees only the fraction that he is making, 
while the other sees the total of which he is contributing a part. 
The latter may paste labels on a can, or round the head of a pin, 
or punch holes in a metal disc; yet to the mechanical process is 
added the thought of the social value of the whole product. There 
is a great deal of very hard disagreeable labor to be performed. 
One thing that can help relieve the dreariness and make the worker's 
life tolerable is the consciousness that the thing he is doing is needed 
and is essential to the welfare of society. 

Effect of the Literature of Work. — It is a rare pleasure to hap- 
pen upon a story, or a poem, or a sketch, in which the author has set 
forth some phase of industrial activity or occupation with a detailed 
affection that breeds a like affection in the reader. One's personality 
becomes many-sided, as he views the world through the eyes of a 
potter, a weaver, a glass-blower, a lumberman, a fisherman, a sales- 
woman, a farmer, a shepherd, a bridge-builder, a telephone operator, a 
sailor. In such reading, one is constantly measuring life in new terms, 
making new estimates, and expanding new sympathies. So the man 
of letters gives the reader vicarious experiences, and helps him to 
find his own field of activity in the working scheme of the world. 



20 THE WORKER AND HIS WORK 

This wide experience by proxy helps to create a better under- 
standing among those three classes of people into which the political 
economist has divided humanity: the producer, the consumer, and 
the distributor. Without such an understanding, there can be no 
true democracy: the interests of the three classes are identical. 

A wide reading among the writers who have described the 
world at work gives one a true appreciation of fine workmanship, 
without which there can be no true culture, and without which one 
buys indiscriminately. America will always be a market for mis- 
cellaneous, inartistic wares until her people become interested in 
the processes of workmanship, and value it rightly. If one has ever 
followed actually or imaginatively the processes by which a piece 
of Venetian Rose Point is evolved, never again will all lace look alike 
or will one quarrel with the price the lacemaker asks. If one has 
observed the rapt absorption of a potter manipulating a piece of 
clay, and realized how much of himself the potter puts into each 
product of his skill, he will wish that the monstrosities masquerading 
as artistic pottery might revert to the primeval dust. It is the 
knowledge of processes that makes one sensitive to the quality of the 
finished product and considerate of the conditions under which the 
worker lives and works. 

The Worker and His Work. — One's vocation, after one's 
religion, is the most important fact in life, for it determines the 
amount of one's leisure, the manner of spending that leisure, and 
also one's associations. It is the chief means of self-expression. Car- 
lyle says that a man can " attain true happiness only in clear decided 
activity in that sphere for which by nature and circumstances he has 
been fitted and appointed." It must provoke one's enthusiasms, as 
well as one's abilities, as a modem critic happily phrased it. Unless 
the vocational activity stirs the creative imagination, it is inappro- 
priate and unfit, and the individual will miss the satisfaction that 
springs from doing one's own peculiar work. For him " the world is 
truly out of joint." Longfellow voices this idea admirably in his 
Michael Angela: 

In happy hours, when the imagination 
Wakes like a wind at midnight, and the soul 
Trembles in all its leaves, it is a joy 
To be uplifted upon its wings, and listen 
To the prophetic voices in the air 



INTRODUCTION 21 

That call us onward. Then the work we do 
Is a delight, and the obedient hand 
Never grows weary . . . 

Sidney Lanier's conception of the true poet may well be taken as 
the ideal of the worker: 

His song was only living aloud, 
His work a singing with his hand. 

He who labors prays, provided he does not approach his work 
as a bungler, an amateur, a dilettante, or a drudge, but aware of 
the process, the perspective, and the philosophy of his work. Over- 
tones, as well as tones, are necessary to complete harmony. So, if 
the worker sees the work in its emotional, and imaginative setting, 
he can attain true culture whether the scene of his work be the fac- 
tory, the shop, the bank, or the dock. The practical affairs of life 
are not common or vulgar, unless one be short-sighted. The short- 
sighted see only baldness, bleakness, and sordidness. 

What is a vocation? It is something more than merely making 
a living. It is man's means of securing abundant life. It is tragic 
to do the work and miss the life. Hence one who works only for pay, 
or any immediate or expedient thing, fails blindly. He uses the 
material resources of the world for base ends. People who work are 
human because their lives are based broad and deep in the funda- 
mentals of life, and not in its trivialities or non-essentials. Dignity 
and independence characterize those who labor. 

Greetings and Work. — Henry Van Dyke says that even the 
speech of those who work has a peculiar flavor. In Fisherman's Luck, 
he asks: 

" Has it ever fallen in your way to notice the quality of the 
greetings that belong to certain occupations? 

" There is something about these salutations in kind which is sin- 
gularly taking and grateful to the ear. They are as much better 
than an ordinary ' good-day ' or flat ' how are you? ' as a folk- 
song of Scotland or the Tyrol is better than the futile love-ditty of 
the drawing-room. They have a spicy and rememberable flavor. 
They speak to the imagination and point the way to treasure-trove. 

" There is a touch of dignity in them, too, for all they are so free 
and easy, the dignity of independence, the native spirit of one who 
takes for granted that his mode of living has a right to make his 



12 THE WORKER AND HIS WORK 

own forms of speech. I admire a man who does not hesitate to 
salute the world in the dialect of his calling. 

" How salty and stimulating, for example, is the sailorman's hail 
of ' Ship ahoy! ' It is like a breeze laden with briny odors and a 
pleasant dash of spray. The miners in some parts of Germany have 
a good greeting for their dusky trade. They cry to one who is going 
down the shaft, * Gluck auf ! ' All the perils of an underground 
adventure and all the joys of seeing the sun again are compressed 
into a word. Even the trivial salutation which the telephone has 
lately created and claimed for its peculiar use — ' Hello, hello! ' — 
seems to me to have a kind of fitness and fascination. It is like a 
thoroughbred bulldog, ugly enough to be attractive. There is a 
lively, concentrated, electric air about it. It makes courtesy wait upon 
dispatch, and reminds us that we live in an age when it is neces- 
sary to be wide awake. 

" I have often wished that every human employment might 
evolve its own appropriate greeting. Some of them would be queer, 
no doubt; but at least they would be an improvement on the weari- 
some iteration of ' Good-evening ' and ' Good-morning,* and the 
monotonous inquiry, ' How do you do? ' — a question so meaningless 
that it seldom tarries for an answer. Under the new and more 
natural system of etiquette, when you passed the time of day with 
a man you would know his business, and the salutations of the 
market-place would be full of interest." 

Unfair Conditions of Work. — ^The distress arising from acute 
economic crises has engaged the attention of many a poet and novel- 
ist. At no time is human nature so shorn of its artificialities as 
when men are thwarted in their efforts to gain a livelihood, and 
demand instantly that they shall receive an adequate medium of 
exchange for their labor. At various periods of history, when num- 
bers of hand-workers have been supplanted by one operator with a 
machine, the material progress has left a train of woe and privation. 
Particularly have poets voiced the dumb woe of those who work and 
struggle vainly to eke out an existence. The Song of the Shirt rings 
true to conditions of to-day. The vials of poetic wrath have been 
poured out rightly upon those who exploit the labor of men and 
women and little children. O. Henry thinks that the man who pays 
salesgirls five dollars a week deserves a more thorough-going punish- 
ment in the future than the man who sets fire to an orphan asylum. 



INTRODUCTION 23 

Elizabeth Browning's Cry of the Children smites our ears to-day 
with an accusing ring, if we listen. North and South, children are 
daily entering the inward closing door of the factory. 

Do you hear the children weeping, O my brothers! 

Ere the sorrow comes with years ? 

They are leaning their young heads against their mothers, 

And that can not stop their tears. 

The young lambs are bleating in the meadows ; 

The young birds are chirping in the nest ; 

The young fawns are playing with the shadows ; 

The young flowers are blowing toward the west: 

But the young, young children, O, my brothers ! 

They are weeping bitterly. 

They are weeping in the playtime of the others, 

In the country of the free. 

And well may the children weep before you ! 

They are weary ere they run; 

They have never seen the sunshine, nor the glory 

Which is brighter than the sun. 

They know the grief of man, without its wisdom; 

They sink in man's despair without its calm ; 

Are slaves, without the liberty in Christdom; 

Are martyrs, by the pang without the palm: 

Are worn as if with age, yet unretrievingly 

The harvest of its memories can not reap ; 

Are orphans of the. earthly love and heavenly — 

Let them weep ! Let them weep ! 

Attitude of the Age Toward Work. — ^The attitude of the age 
toward labor is characteristic; it is one that is conscious of the 
grandeur, the dignity, and the power inherent in work. There is no 
vain regretting of the past, that loudly deplores the antagonism be- 
tween modem commercial life and art. Joseph Pennell sees in the 
electric lights of New York a " pattern of stars, undreamed of by 
Hiroshigi." Brooklyn Bridge, leaping forward span on span across 
the sky, great towers thrust skywards to the clouds, the commercial 
harbor, the necessary light-house, the throbbing power-house, the 
rolling-mill in full blast, and likewise the worker himself — all have 
artistic possibilities to the artist who is pulsing with the electric 
currents of the twentieth century. More than most poets has Kip- 



24 THE WORKER AND HIS WORK 

ling appreciated the workingman fairly, neither under-estimating 
him nor over-estimating him. It is not necessary to invest labor 
with a halo. In The Wage Slaves, Kipling has paid the workingman 
a tribute that must be very acceptable to the man who " dowers each 
mortgaged hour alike with clean courage." 

Machinery and Work. — ^With that same attitude toward labor, 
goes the modern conception of machinery. Only most recently 
has the machine been regarded with anything but tolerance: it was 
a useful thing, but hardly a thing for which we could ever have a 
warm, personal regard. Now, the modern thinker is evangelically 
preaching: the man must dominate the machine: do work with a 
machine in a craftsmanlike manner: it is the machine that frees 
you and gives you the leisure and opportunity for the larger and 
ever larger life. Few critics of modern life have so well expressed 
the relation of man to the machine as has Gerald Stanley Lee in 
The Voice of the Machines and Crowds. He insists that we may 
watch machines work, that we may control machines, but that it is 
not necessary to surrender our minds to a machine. Shall we be 
tools, or independent, self-directing individuals using a tool? If the 
worker's mind can be fixed on complete thoughts, or wholes, not on 
fragments; if he can be sensible of the poetry of the process of the 
work; if he refuses to be separated from the finished product, then 
his actual work may be rounding the head of a pin, or piercing the 
eye of a needle, or pasting a label on a can, but he is not a machine; 
he is a free and independent worker doing his share of the necessary 
work of the world. The finished product is his child. One may not go 
so far as to see with Kipling's M 'Andrew " predestination in the stride 
of yon connectin'-rod," but most of us can sympathize with the 
dour Scot's engineer in his sentiment about steam and romance. 

That minds me of our Viscount loon, Sir Kinneth's kin — the chap 

Wi' Russia leather tennis-shoon an' spar-decked yachtin'-cap. 

I showed him round last week, o'er all — an' at the last says he, 

" Mister M'Andrew, don't you think steam spoils romance at sea ? " 

Damned ijjit! I'd been doon that morn to see what ailed the thro'ws, 

Manholin', on my back — the cranks three inches off my nose. 

Romance ! Those first-class passengers — they like it very well, 

Printed an' bound in little books ; but why don't poets tell ? 

I'm sick of all their quirks an' turns, the loves an' doves they dream — 

Lord, send a man like Robbie Burns to sing the Song o' Steam ! 



INTRODUCTION 25 

To match wi' Sccytia's noblest speech yon orchestra sublime — 

Whaurto — uplifted like the just — the tail-rods mark the time. 

The cranks throws give the double bass, the feed-pump sobs an' heaves; 

An' now the main eccentrics start their quarrel on the sheaves : 

Her time, her own appointed time, the rocking link-head bides, 

Till — hear that note? — the rod's return whings glimmerin' through the 

guides. 
They're all awa ! True beat, full power, the clangin' chorus goes 
Clear to the tunnel where they sit, my purrin' dynamos. 
Oh for a man to weld it then, in one trip-hammer strain, 
Till even first-class passengers could tell the meanin' plain! 
But no one cares except mysel' that serve an' understand 
My seven thousand horsepower there. Eh, Lord ! They're grand — they're 

grand.* 

Steam is the very breath of the twentieth century. Years ago, 
Walt Whitman asked, " Is it not possible in this age of machine and 
factory production to teach the average man the glory of his walk 
and trade? " The answer is a ringing " aye." 

'Stratification of Work. — Any system of training that tends to 
fix the worker in a groove, or, to change the figure, that brings about 
a sharply defined stratification of work, is as undemocratic and as 
dangerous to the principles underlying our government as is the 
caste system of East India, for industrial and occupational strati- 
fication tends to social stratification, a condition peculiarly objection- 
able to the western mind. A man may do one thing day after day, 
but he should be flexible, physically and mentally, capable of making 
quick adjustments, and alert to all that life holds of interest and 
wonder. It is the special duty of all young people to see to it that 
their life work does not prove a " blind alley." One of the leading 
educational thinkers of to-day says: "It is not his work in itself 
that is so destructive to the spiritual life of the industrial worker. 
It is rather that he has so little else in his life." Browning expresses 
the same thought in his Shop: 

Because a man has shop to mind 
In time and place, since flesh must live. 
Needs spirit lack all life behind, 
All stray thoughts, fancies fugitive. 
All loves except what trade can give? 

* M'Andreufs Hymn by Rudyard Kipling. 



26 THE WORKER AND HIS WORK 

I want to know a butcher paints, 
A baker rhymes for his pursuit, 
Candlestick-maker much acquaints 
His soul with song, or, haply mute, 
Blows out his brains upon the flute ! 

But — shop each day and all day long ! 
Friend, your good angel slept, your star 
Suffered eclipse, fate did you wrong! 
Fromj where these sorts of treasures are. 
There should our heart be — Christ, how far! 

Culture and Work. — ^Just so far as industrial life can base itself 
in those qualities that make us all kindred, and are therefore uni- 
versal, so far is industrial life a cultural life, and industrial education 
affords as liberal a culture as does the humanistic curriculum. This 
view is rapidly becoming the creed of the educational world. The 
welfare of democracy depends upon having the largest possible 
factor common to liberal and industrial education. Cultural occu- 
pation! An apparent paradox! But what a comment on society 
that it should be startled by such a combination of words! How 
poor is that individual who has not the means of securing life, and 
even more abundant life! 

The world's no blot nor blank, 

But means intensely, and means good, 

to the man or woman who has found his work and is doing it. 



SUGGESTIONS FOR STUDY 



To THE Teacher 



I. The editor suggests that the study of the bibliography come 
first. The student should put a classified list of the refer- 
ences in the bibliography in his note-book and add to it both 
books and magazine articles. 
II. The student should be encouraged to read the entire text from 
which a selection is made. This reading can serve as material 
for oral and written book reports. 

III. If any of the occupations and industries are represented in the 

student's community, he should be urged to investigate the 
one in which he is most interested, make a report to his 
class, and embody the results of his investigations in themes. 

IV. The student should make a study of catalogues, with a view to 

finding out the best schools where training in a given field 
can be obtained. 
V. Interviews with men and women who have succeeded in a given 
field are stimulating to the student. As soon as possible, 
the student should become familiar with the use of the 
Reader's Guide to Periodical Literature. In many cases, his 
best sources of information are recent magazines. The abil- 
ity to use a library intelligently is one of the first accomplish- 
ments of the successful student. 
VI. In addition to writing themes, and writing business letters for 
catalogues, the text can serve the student's composition needs 
further by suggesting fruitful subjects for debate; for ex- 
ample, questions of taste in advertising, business ethics, or 
the advantage of college training in certain vocations. 
VII. The following questions and topics illustrate the kind of 
assignment that may be given the student: 
A. " Every occupation has its heroes, its discoveries, and 
its romances, some of which are as fascinating as 
military history." 

27 



28 THE WORKER AND HIS WORK 

Verify this statement with reference to one of 
the following masters of achievement: 

1. Elias Howe. 

2. Cyrus Hall McCormick. 

3. Wilbur Wright. 

4. Glenn Curtiss. 

5. Elbert Henry Gary. 

6. Philip Danforth Armour. 

7. Henry Clay Frick. 

8. George Westinghouse. 

9. Edward Henry Harriman. 

10. James Jerome Hill. 

11. Montgomery Ward. 

12. Andrew Carnegie. 

13. John Merven Carrere. 

14. George Washington Goethals. 

B. Some suggestions for theme subjects: 

1. Grandmother's Cook-Book. 

2. " Ready-to-serve " and " Ready-to-wear." 

3. The Relation of Food to Efficient Living. 

C. 1. Is there any connection between advertising and 

extravagance? 

2. Does the value of billboard advertising offset the 

disfigurement of our streets, highways, and sky- 
lines? 

3. Subject for debate: Resolved, that advertising exer- 

cises a wholesome influence on American life. 

D. Make an outline for a theme, showing how a painter, a 

poet, a laborer, a business man, a social worker, and a 
Secretary of War would probably view a foundry. 

E. Topic for discussion: A Good Speaking Voice a Busi- 

ness Asset. 

1. In what vocations is it particularly essential? 

F. 1. Name some of the great feats of engineering and 

engineers? 
2. Compare Kipling's, Hopkinson Smith's, and Rex 
Beach's methods of telling a stirring narrative as 
illustrated in Bridge Builders, Caleb West, and 
The Iron Trail. 



SUGGESTIONS FOR STUDY 29 

G. What sculptors and painters have succeeded in the por- 
trayal of modem industry? See introduction to Pic- 
tures of Wonder of Work by Joseph Pennell. 
H. Where are the great pottery industries of the United 
States located? What schools give courses in 
ceramics? 

I. Make a three-minute report on the life of Miss Ida M. 
Tarbell. Do you agree with her views expressed in 
Woman and Her Raiment? 

J. Where are the granite and marble quarries of the United 
States located? Compare the methods of quarrying 
in the United States and England. 

K. What role did civil engineering play in the recent 
Great War? 

L. Make a list of the men and women most prominent in 
American industrial life. 

M. Topic for discussion: Does the department store offer 
attractive opportunities for the ambitious boy or girl? 

N. Define the terms: job, position, wages, salary, minimum 
wage, trade, vocation, occupation, industry. 

O. Interpret the following newspaper clipping: 

Three men are cutting stone up yonder in the 
Cathedral grounds. " What are you doing. No. 1? " 
" I am working for $6.75 a day." " What are you 
doing, No. 2? " " I am squaring this stone." " What 
are you doing. No. 3?" " I am helping to build 
that," and this worker, with mind reaching out be- 
yond his toil, and with a noble spirit of partisanship 
with the best, points proudly up to the great unfin- 
ished Cathedral on the hill. 

(The Cathedral is the Cathedral of Saint John the 
Divine on Morningside Heights in New York.) 

P. Below are summaries of books, clipped from catalogues. 
Write similar terse comments on a half-dozen books 
in the bibliography. 

1. The Winning of Barbara Worth. By Harold 
Bell Wright. 

In this present-day story of desert life 
and the national reclamation work we have as 



30 THE WORKER AND HIS WORK 

clean and wholesome a book as a man ever 
wrote; a story of big things, strong people, 
and high ideals. The plot, through which 
there runs an intense love interest, is mighty 
in its conception and is carried to a satisfac- 
tory close with the smoothness of running 
water. It is one of big incidents and rapid 
action, and bears a message as broad as 
humanity itself. — The Ministry of Capital. 

2. The Iron Trail. By Rex Beach. 

The hero of Rex Beach's new Alaskan 
story is just such a man as Kipling had in 
mind when he wrote " If " — one who could 
keep his head in every emergency. There 
were plenty of things to stand up against, too 
— other men's scheming, lack of funds, storms, 
glaciers, and misrepresentation. But he won 
his fight against Nature as he won the heart 
of the unusual heroine. 

3. Wall Street Stories. By Edwin Lefevre. 

In these intimate stories of " the Street," 
the author, like a keen-eyed, experienced 
showman, points out to the spectator the 
Bulls and Bears, and tells strange tales of 
their habits and customs. Mr. Lefevre's 
trenchant pen draws the different types that 
fill the noisy, tragic world of speculation. 
This is a book which every man who ever 
followed stock quotations will find of absorb- 
ing interest, and perhaps he may recognize 
well-known Wall Street characters beneath 
their disguises. 
Q. The work of reclaiming our western deserts challenges 
the imagination and appeals to each one according 
to his profession. Plan a talk to be given to your 
class, in which you explam this work of reclamation 
and show what phase of it interests 

1. The artist 

2. The civil engineer 



SUGGESTIONS FOR STUDY 31 

3. The agriculturist 

4. The railroad magnate 

5. The student of geography 

The following clipping from Munsey, October, 
1917, will be suggestive: 

" When Harriman Fought a Big River " 

" George Kennan has an eye for the picturesque in 
his story of ' The Salton Sea ' and Harriman's fight 
with the Colorado River. Ages ago the Gulf of Cali- 
fornia ran much farther inland than now. The 
Colorado River, dumping its load of silt into the 
gulf, built a bar across it and left the upper waters to 
burn out in the desert. Every three or four centuries 
the river, in flood, would cut through its self-built 
barrier, and temporarily fill the basin with fresh water. 

"Men with imagination conceived the idea of guid- 
ing part of the stream permanently into such a chan- 
nel and using the water to reclaim, by irrigation, 
millions of desert acres. The story of the attempt is 
thrilling. One engineer after another tried and 
failed. Companies came and went; the project re- 
fused to die. At last Harriman undertook to dam 
the stream with dollars. 

" The great enterprise was well under way when, 
in 1906, floods threatened to wipe out all the labor 
of men's hands, and to destroy the homes and prop- 
erty of some twelve thousand people settled in the 
valley. The fertilizing stream had become a destroy- 
ing torrent, and the Colorado was pouring into the 
Salton basin more than four billion cubic feet of water 
every twenty-four hours. 

" Harriman had hurried to San Francisco to help 
that city in its distress. It was in April, just after 
the earthquake and fire. The president of the Cali- 
fornia Development Company hastened to see Presi- 
dent Harriman of the Southern Pacific Railway 
Company, and told him what was happening. 



32 THE WORKER AND HIS WORK 

" There, in the bustle and confusion of temporary 
offices, with the ruins of San Francisco still smoking, 
with the facilities of his roads taxed to the utmost in 
carrying people away from the stricken city, with 
the wonderful railway system which constituted his 
life-work crippled to an unknown extent, he consented 
to advance an additional sum of two hundred and 
fifty thousand dollars for controlling the river and 
protecting the valley. 

" Ten years ago the Imperial Valley yielded, from 
its once desert soil, crops worth twelve hundred thou- 
sand dollars a year. Now its cotton, barley, fruit and 
vegetables, and the live stock that crops its grasses, 
represent an annual production of ten times 
the amount." 
R. Do you agree to the following statement: 

" If you want to know whether you are going to 
be a success or a failure in life," said James J. Hill, 
" you can easily find out. The test is simple and 
infallible. Are you able to save money? If not, 
drop out. You will lose. You may not think it, but 
you will lose as sure as you live. The seed of suc- 
cess is not in you." 
S. The following diagram was made by Mr. Henry J. 
Fischer of Cleveland, Ohio, and is reproduced here 
by courtesy of The Independent. 

1. What is the relation of thrift to character? 

2. What is the relation of thrift to work? 

3. Americans are said to be an extravagant people, 

and the French thrifty. What is your opinion? 

4. What plan of saving would you advocate for 

the wage-earner, so that his old age may 
be independent? 

5. What is your opinion of the accompanying dia- 

gram? Is it accurate, according to your 

observations? 

T. One critic writes: " In this day of storm and stress one 

cannot read Miss Morgan's poem entitled Kinship 

without being touched to finer issues, even in the dis- 



SUGGESTIONS FOR STUDY 



33 



Diagram Showing That the Habit of Saving Must be Formed and 
Exercised Early in Life 



Evexything to 

gain and 

nothing to 

20 \ lose. 



This 

is the egotistical 
period — when 
the son thinks he 
knows more than 
his father. This 
space represents 
the son's egotism. 



Age of wild oats. 



' This space represents man's accu- 
mulating period. Either success 
or failure is settled. No days of 
grace are allowed. 



3^\nOW or 1 


NEVER 


I 
1 


The boy 


,^\ : Danger line. • 


is now 


35 X. 1 ! 


chang- 


>v : 


ing his 


The son 


V. i 


mind 


realizes 


>V j 


and con- 


that life 


40^\ i 


cludes 


is a real- 




he 


ity and 






doesn't 


he is not 


97 per 




know as 


as smart 


cent, of 


45 \^ 


much as 


as he 


men here 




he im- 


once 


meet 




agined. 
He now 


thought. 


with re- 




The 


verses 


By this 


considers 


father 


and lose 


age 97 


his father 


was a 


their en- 


per 


a man of 


man of 


tire ac- 


cent. 


fair judg- 


master 


cumula- 


have 


ment. 


mind. 


tions. 


lost all. 



This is the age of 
caution as man must 
not speculate, for he 
has all to lose and 
nothing to gain. 
He looks for security, 
not high rates of 
interest. 



SO 

After this 
age but one in 
5,000 can recover 
his financial footing. 



C 3 






a "5 
° t 

^ o 
a M 

ft s 

1/) <u 



60 



If you do not securely lay up during the harvest, the drouth of old age will 
catch you without provender at sixty. 



charge of the simplest duties. Her words carry in 
them a magic glow. Read this poem quietly and 
then aloud, and feel its warm beat and musi- 
cal rhythm.'* 

Carry out the suggestion in the last sentence. 
Write a short paragraph interpreting this poem, 
Kinship, found in The Hour Has Struck. 
U. Show that the following passage from the Marble Faun, 
by Hawthorne, chap. 5, is an illustration of good 
paragraph structure. Find other paragraphs in this 
text that illustrate the laws of unity and coherence 
in paragraph structure. 

"There is something extremely pleasant, and even 
touching — at least, of very sweet, soft and winning 



34 THE WORKER AND HIS WORK 

effect — in this peculiarity of needlework, distinguish- 
ing women from men. Our own sex is incapable of 
any such by-play aside from the main business of 
life; but women — be they of what earthly rank they 
may, however gifted with intellect or genius, or en- 
dowed with awful beauty — have always some little 
handiwork ready to fill the tiny gap of every vacant 
moment. A needle is familiar to the fingers of them 
all. A queen, no doubt, plies it on occasion; the 
woman poet can use it as adroitly as her pen; the 
woman's eye, that has discovered a new star, turns 
from its glory to send the polished little instrument 
gleaming along the hem of her kerchief, or to dam 
a casual fray in her dress. And they have greatly 
the advantage of us in this respect. The slender 
thread of silk or cotton keeps them united with the 
small, familiar, gentle interests of life, the continually 
operating influences of which do so much for the 
health of the character, and carry off what would 
otherwise be a dangerous accumulation of morbid 
sensibility. A vast deal of human sympathy runs 
along this electric line, stretching from the throne to 
the wicker chair of the humblest seamstress, and 
keeping high and low in a species of communion with 
their kindred beings. Methinks it is a token of 
healthy and gentle characteristics, when women of 
high thoughts and accomplishments love to sew; 
especially as they are never more at home with their 
own hearts than while so occupied." 
V. You will find in Old Chester Tales, by Margaret Deland, 
a story of an untrained woman who is confronted 
with the necessity of making her living. Read the 
story and make an outline for a talk to your class, 
contrasting the education described in the story and 
the kind of education a girl receives in a modern 
high school. In what respects is the girl of to-day the 
gainer and in what respects the loser? 



SUGGESTIONS FOR STUDY 35 

W. At the conclusion of your study of this text-book, make 
a list of the titles that you think would be appropriate 
for it. Which one is most fitting? 
Compare: 

Day's Work, Rudyard Kipling. 
Livelihood y Wilfrid Gibson. 
Daily Bread, Wilfrid Gibson. 
Songs of a Workaday World, Berton Braley. 
The World's Work (Magazine). 



WORK 
By Henry van Dyke 

Let me but do my work from day to day, 

In field or forest, at the desk or loom. 
In roaring market-place or tranquil room. 

Let me but find it in my heart to say. 
When vagrant wishes beckon me astray, 

" This is my work; my blessing, not my doom; 
Of all who live, I am the one by whom 

This work can best be done in the right way." 

Then shall I see it not too great, nor small. 
To suit my spirit and to prove my powers; 

Then shall I cheerful greet the laboring hours, 
And cheerful turn, when the long shadows fall, 

At eventide, to play and love and rest; 
Because I know for me my work is best. 



S6 



WORK: A SONG OF TRIUMPH 

By Angela Morgan 

Workr 

Thank God for the might of it, 

The ardor, the urge, the delight of it — 

Work that springs from the heart's desire. 

Setting the brain and the soul on fire — 

Oh, what is so good as the heat of it, 

And what is so glad as the beat of it, 

And what is so kind as the stern command, 

Challenging brain and heart and hand? 

Work! 

Thank God for the pride of it, 

For the beautiful, conquering tide of it, 

Sweeping the life in its furious flood, 

Thrilling the arteries, cleansing the blood. 

Mastering stupor and dull despair. 

Moving the dreamer to do or dare. 

Oh, what is so good as the urge of it. 

And what is so glad as the surge of it, 

And what is so strong as the summons deep. 

Rousing the torpid soul from sleep? 

Work! 

Thank God for the pace of it. 

For the terrible, keen, swift race of it; 

Fiery steeds in full control, 

Nostrils a-quiver to greet the goal. 

Work, the Power that drives behind, 

Guiding the purposes, taming the mind. 

Holding the runaway wishes back, 

Reigning the will to one steady track. 

Speeding the energies faster, faster. 

Triumphing over disaster. 

37 



3S THE WORKER AND HIS WORK 

Workl 

Thank God for the swing of it, 
For the clamoring, hammering ring of it, 
Passion of labor daily hurled 
On the mighty anvils of the world. 
Oh, what is so fierce as the flame of it? 
And what is so huge as the aim of it? 
Thundering on through dearth and doubt, 
Calling the plan of the Maker out, 
Work, the Titan; Work, the friend, 
Shaping the earth to a glorious end, 
Draining the swamps and blasting the hills, 
Doing whatever the Spirit wills — 
Rending a continent apart. 
To answer the dream of the Master heart. 
Thank God for a world where none may shirk- 
Thank God for the splendor of work! 



KEEP ON WORKING 
By Richard Eugene Burton 

Health, work, and religion are the three things which make life 
least a bore and most a blessing. Nor need work apologize to the 
other two. Work of the right kind conduces to health and becomes 
religion; hence the Scriptural commendation of good workmen by- 
Solomon: " They shall maintain the fabric of the world, and in the 
handiwork of their craft is their prayer." 

It was Burke, I believe, who with this in mind offered the advice: 
" Work, work, and never despair; but even if you do despair, keep 
on working." He knew it for a chief antidote against hopelessness. 

Ruskin once said that there were three desiderata for a happy 
life: congenial work, not too much of it, and a fair return for one's 
labor. As to this last, he did not mean a mere revi^rd in money, 
but a sense in the worker that his product is of use, of value to 
fellow-men, that he has not in this sense labored in vain. The 
return may come in the respect of the community, its readiness to 
intrust him with some undertaking of importance to the general weal 
— in this, rather than in the sum he is paid. The big thing is the 
consciousness in the worker that he is a help, not a hindrance, to the 
social machine; that he makes something that has beauty or utility 
or, better yet, both. 

The number of those who work in a way to illustrate Ruskin^s 
ideal makes but a small fraction of the great army of workers. Con- 
sider the misfits, for one thing. It is astonishing how many folk 
will say to you, " My business is merely a manner of money-getting. 
It is distasteful to me in the extreme, and I would get out of it 
to-morrow if I could. My pleasure comes from the hours outside 
my work." What a pity this is, for if a human being has any right, 
it is the right of congenial employment, the chance to do what he 
is interested in, that which stimulates his faculties and draws out his 
best endeavor. It is only by doing such work that he becomes of 

Taken from Burton's Little Essays in Literature cmd Life, by per- 
mission of The Century Co. 

39 



40 THE WORKER AND HIS WORK 

full value to society. But for various reasons mortals go into work 
for other than the imperative reason of calUng: because the busmess 
was handed down from father to son; because a stem necessity of 
self-support demanded that the first work that came to hand should 
be done; or, again, because the rewards were so ghttermg that repug- 
nance was overcome. And yet, surely, all men and women should 
be doing the manner of work most to their liking, most e^ressive 
of their personality; the one thing they were born to do, and therefore 
can do happily and do best. 

Parents have a terrible responsibiUty here, and too often mis- 
conceive it, when they compel their young ones to t^e up some 
form of activity not suited to their powers. It would be well to 
understand that, whenever serious-minded, well-meaning young 
persons have a deep conviction that a certain sort of work calls them, 
they should be allowed to give it a trial. By doing so, either they 
find that it is their true occupation, or not, and so, satisfied, turn to 
other work. But if they do not give it a trial, they will be dissat- 
isfied to their death-day. The beginning and basis of the right 
kind of life, then, is choosing wisely one's work. The world has no 
use for misfits, and the misfits are unhappy, poor creatures, when 
half the time it is not altogether their fault, but the fault of their 
environment or necessity. 

Think, also, of the immense number of human beings who work 
under the' wrong conditions: hours overlong, work-places lacking air 
and light, needless harshness, even cruelty, of employers, the nature 
of the toil brutalizing and demoralizing. The figures would sadden, 
and the facts appal, could they be comprehended to their full extent. 
It was with this abuse of work, as it touched the children, in mmd 
that great-hearted Mrs. Browning, half a century ago, wrote that 
piercing Cry of the Children which, in its white-hot passion of 
loving sorrow, was one of the documents of the day, and led on to our 
own, when industrial conditions are being bettered. 

Do you hear the children weeping and disproving, 
O my brothers, what ye preach ? 
For God's possible is taught by His world's loving, 
And the children doubt of each. 

Even when the physical conditions that surround the work are 
endurable or pleasant, that work is not what it should be that lacks 



>. 




CARRIER. BY CONSTANTIN MEUNIER 



KEEP ON WORKING 41 

a sense of aim and accomplishment. It is better to make something 
one can take a pleasure in the making of; but how seldom is that 
true of the worker! Grant, with the old poet, that to sweep a room 
in the right spirit "makes that and the action fine"; still, to be 
honest, there is work and work, and it is hard to see how the labor 
of a man in the stockyards, in whatever spirit done, can give that 
inward satisfaction which ought to come from every kind of human 
labor, no matter how fruitless or lowly. 

A special danger has arisen from the modem differentiation of 
work, for the reason that, where once the head, hand, and heart col- 
laborated in a trinity of activity to the making of a seemly whole, 
now, with the advent of machinery, the labor has largely become 
partial, blind, and so pleasureless. To make a pin may not be 
esthetic work, but it is much better than to make the head of a pin, 
because in the former case you are at least intelligently producing 
something of wholeness and usefulness. Manhood and womanhood 
should be retained in the work, but to make the head of a pin has 
the tendency to make a machine out of a human being; it is not a 
finished product, but merely part of the process of its making. 

It is a satire to talk about pleasure in one's work under some 
conditions. The present-day handicraft movement is a reaction to 
the better conditions of work in an age past when the artisan, the 
workman, was also the artist, having joy of his labor, and so pre- 
serving his humanity. Doutbless, we shall gradually so alter the 
social wrongs and evils which now make this planet appear a little 
damaged, and install the worker in work so congenial, so close-fitted 
to his aptitude and desire, that it will be his deepest satisfaction and 
most lasting solace: that which steadies, rectifies, uplifts, and rejoices 
him throughout his days and up to the final rest. Nay, are we not 
altering our conceptions of Heaven in order to allow of happy, useful, 
unselfish work there — work, instead of the older notion of sitting 
around in an elegant leisure enlivened by select music? 

Work, ideally, should be congenial, fruitful, and the worker 
aware of his worth to the world. Nobody works harder than the 
idler; he has on his hands the dire task of killing time. Knowing 
the awfulness of vacuity, he fills the day with a semblance of activity, 
while gnawing at his peace is a sense of the barren folly of it all. 
The finest argument for real work is the spectacle of its counter- 
feit presentment. 



THE MAIL-ORDER HOUSE 

By Arnold Bennett 

There are business organizations in America of a species which 
do not flourish at all in Europe. For example, the " mail-order 
house," whose secrets were very generously displayed to me in 
Chicago — a peculiar establishment which sells nearly everything 
(except patent-medicines) — on condition that you order it by post. 
Go into that house with money in your palm, and ask for a fan or 
a flail or a fur-coat or a fountain-pen or a fiddle, and you will be 
requested to return home and write a letter about the proposed pur- 
chase, and stamp the letter and drop it into a mail-box, and then wait 
till the article arrives at your door. That house is one of the most 
spectacular and pleasing proofs that the inhabitants of the United 
States are thinly scattered over an enormous area, in tiny groups, 
often quite isolated from stores. On the day of my visit sixty 
thousand letters had been received, and every executable order con- 
tained in these was executed before closing time, by the coordinated 
efforts of over four thousand female employees and over three thou- 
sand males. The conception would make Europe dizzy. Imagine a 
merchant in Moscow trying to inaugurate such a scheme! 

A little machine no bigger than a soup-plate will open hundreds 
of envelopes at once. They are all the same, those envelopes; they 
have even less individuality than sheep being sheared, but when the 
contents of one — any one at random — are put into your hand, some- 
thing human and distinctive is put into your hand. I read the 
caligraphy on a blue sheet of paper, and it was written by a woman 
in Wyoming, a neat, earnest, harassed, and possibly rather harassing 
woman, and she wanted aJl sorts of things and wanted them intensely 
— I could see that with clearness. This complex purchase was an 
important event in her year. So far as her imagination went, only 
one mail-order would reach the Chicago house that morning, and the 
entire establishment would be strained to meet it. 

Then the blue sheet was taken from me and thrust into the sys- 
tem, and therein lost to me. I was taken to a mysteriously rumbling 
shaft of broad diameter, that pierced all the floors of the house and 
42 



THE MAIL-ORDER HOUSE 43 

had trap-doors on each floor. And when one of "the trap-doors was 
opened 1 saw packages of all descriptions racing after one another 
down spiral planes within the shaft. .There were several of these 
shafts — with divisions for mail, express and freight traffic — and pack- 
ages were ceaselessly racing down all of them, laden with the objects 
desired by the woman of Wyoming and her fifty-nine-thousand-odd 
fellow-customers of the day. At first it seemed to me impossible 
that that earnest, impatient woman in Wyoming should get precisely 
what she wanted; it seemed to me impossible that some mistake 
should not occur in all that noisy fever of rushing activity. But 
after I had followed an order, and seen it filled and checked, my 
opinion was that a mistake would be the most miraculous phenom- 
enon in that establishment. I felt quite reassured on behalf 
of Wyoming. 

And then I was suddenly in a room where six' himdred billing- 
machines were being cHcked at once by six hundred young women, 
a fantastic aural nightmare, though none of the young women 
appeared to be conscious that anything bizarre was going on. . . . 
And then I was in a printing-shop, where several lightning machines 
spent their whole time every day in printing the most popular work 
of reference in the United States, a bulky book full of pictures, with 
an annual circulation of five and a half million copies — the general 
catalogue of the firm. For the first time I realized the true meaning 
of the word " popularity " — and sighed. . . . 

And then it was lunch time for about a couple of thousand 
employees and in the boundless restaurant I witnessed the working 
of the devices which enabled these legions to choose their meals, and 
pay for them (cost price) in a few minutes, and without advanced 
mathematical calculations. The young head of the restaurant showed 
me, with pride, a menu of over a hundred dishes — Austrian, German, 
Hungarian, Italian, Scotch, French and American — at prices from 
one cent up as high as ten cents (prime roast-beef) — and at the foot 
of the menu was his personal appeal: " I desire to extend to you a 
cordial invitation to inspect," etc. " My constant aim will be," etc. 
Yet it was not his restaurant. It was the firm's restaurant. Here 
I had a curious illustration of an admirable characteristic of Ameri- 
can business methods that was always striking me — namely, the real 
delegation of responsibility. An American board of direction will 
put a man in charge of a department, as a viceroy over a province, 



44 THE WORKER AND HIS WORK 

saying, as it were: *' This is yours. Do as you please with it. We 
will watch the results." A marked contrast this with the central- 
izing of authority which seems to be ever proceeding in Europe, and 
which breeds in all classes at all ages — especially in France— a morbid 
fear and horror of accepting responsibility. 

Later, I was on the ground level, in the midst of an enormous 
apparent confusion — the target for all the packages and baskets, 
big and Httle, that shot every instant in a continuous stream from 
those spiral planes, and slid dangerously at me along the floors. 
Here were the packers. I saw a packer deal with a collected order, 
and in this order were a number of tiny crockery utensils, a four-cent 
curling iron, a brush, and two incredibly ugly pink china mugs, 
inscribed in cheap gilt respectively with the words " Father " and 
" Mother." Throughout my stay in America no moment came to 
me more dramatically than this moment, and none has remained more 
vividly in my mind. All the daily domestic life of the small com- 
munities in the wilds of the West and the Middle West, and in the 
wilds of the back streets of the great towns, seemed to be revealed 
to me by the contents of that basket, as the packer wrapped up and 
protected one article after another. I had been compelled to abandon 
a visitation of the West and of the small communities elsewhere, 
and I was sorry. But here in a microcosm I thought I saw the simple 
reality of the backbone of all America, a symbol of the millions of 
the little plain people, who ultimately make possible the glory of the 
world-renowned streets and institutions in dazzling cities. 

There was something indescribably touching in that curling-iron 
and those two mugs. I could see the table on which the mugs would 
soon proudly stand, and " father " and " mother " and children 
thereat, and I could see the hand heating the curling-iron and apply- 
ing it. I could see the whole little home and the whole life of the 
little home. . . . And afterward, as I wandered through the ware- 
houses — pyramids of the same chair, cupboards full of the same 
cheap violin, stacks of the same album music, acres of the same 
carpet, and wallpaper, tons of the same gramaphone, hundreds of 
tons of the same sewing-machine and lawn-mower — I felt as if 
I had been made free of the secrets of every village in every State 
of the Union, and as if I had lived in every little house and cottage 
thereof all my life! Almost no sense of beauty in those tremendous 
supplies of merchandise, but a lot of honesty, self-respect and ambi- 



THE MAIL-ORDER HOUSE 45 

tion fulfilled. I tell you I could hear the engaged couples discussing 
ardently over the pages of the catalogue what design of sideboard. 

Finally, I arrived at the firm's private railway station, where a 
score or more trucks were being laden with the multifarious boxes, 
bales and parcels, all to leave that evening for romantic destinations 
such as Oregon, Texas, and Wyoming. Yes, the package of the 
woman of Wyoming's desire would ultimately be placed somewhere 
in one of those trucks 1 It was going to start off to her that 
very night! 



THE AMERICAN TELEPHONE 
By Arnold Bennett 

What strikes and frightens the backward European as much as 
anything in the United States is the efficiency and fearful universal- 
ity of the telephone. Just as I think of the big cities as agglomera- 
tions pierced everywhere by elevator-shafts full of movement, so I 
think of them as being threaded, under pavements and over roofs 
and between floors and ceilings and between walls, by millions upon 
millions of live filaments that unite all the privacies of the organism 
— and destroy them in order to make one immense publicity! I do 
not mean that Europe has failed to adopt the telephone, nor that in 
Europe there are no hotels with the dreadful curse of an active 
telephone in every room. But I do mean that the European tele- 
phone is a toy, and a somewhat clumsy one, compared with the 
inexorable seriousness of the American telephone. Many otherwise 
highly civilized Europeans are as timid in addressing a telephone as 
they would be in addressing a royal sovereign. The average European 
middle class householder still speaks of his telephone, if he has one, 
in the same falsely casual tone as the corresponding American is 
liable to speak of his motor car. It is naught — a negligible trifle — 
but somehow it comes into the conversation! 

It is the efficiency of the telephone that makes it irresistible to a 
great people whose passion is to " get results " — the instancy with 
which the communication is given, and the clear loudness of the 
telephone's voice in reply to yours: phenomena utterly unknown in 
Europe. Were I to inhabit the United States, I, too, should become 
a victim of the telephone habit. 

Now it is obvious that behind the apparently simple exterior 
aspects of any telephone system there must be an intricate and mar- 
velous secret organization. In Europe my curiosity would probably 
never have been excited by the thought of that organization — at 
home one accepts everything as of course! — but in the United States, 
partly because the telephone is so much more wonderful and terrible 
there, and partly because in a foreign land one is apt to have strange 
caprices, I allowed myself to become the prey of a desire to see the 
46 



THE AMERICAN TELEPHONE 47 

arcanum concealed at the other end of all the wires; and thus, one 
day, under the high protection of a demigod of the electrical world, 
I paid a visit to a telephone-exchange in New York, and saw therein 
what nine hundred and ninety-nine out of every thousand of the 
most ardent telephone users seldom think about and will never see. 

A murmuring sound, as of an infinity of scholars in a prim school 
conning their lessons, and a long row of young women seated in a dim 
radiance on a long row of precisely similar stools, before a long 
apparatus of holes and pegs and pieces of elastic cord, all extremely 
intent: that was the first broad impression. One saw at once that 
none of these young women had a single moment to spare; they 
were all involved in the tremendous machine, part of it, keeping 
pace with it and in it, and not daring to take their eyes off it for an 
instant, lest they should sin against it. What they were droning 
about it was impossible to guess; for if one stationed oneself close 
to any particular rapt young woman, she seemed to utter no sound, 
but simply and without ceasing to peg and unpeg holes at random 
among the thousands of holes before her, apparently in obedience 
to the signaling of faint, tiny lights that in thousands continually 
expired and were rekindled. (It was so that these tiny lights should 
be distinguishable that the illumination of the secret and finely 
appointed chamber was kept dim.) Throughout the whole length 
of the apparatus the colored elastic cords to which the pegs were 
attached kept crossing one another in fantastic patterns. 

We who had entered were ignored. We might have been ghosts, 
invisible and inaudible. Even the supervisors, less-young women 
set in authority, did not turn to glance at us as they moved rest- 
lessly peering behind the stools. And yet somehow I could hear the 
delicate shoulders of all the young women saying, without speech: 
" Here come these tyrants and taskmasters again, who have invented 
this exercise which nearly but not quite cracks our little brains for 
us! They know exactly how much they can get out of us, and they 
get it. They are cleverer than us and more powerful than us; and 

we have to submit to their discipline. But '^ And afar off I 

could hear: " What are you going to wear to-night? " " Will you 
dine with me to-night? " " I want two seats." " Very well, thanks, 

and how is Mrs. ? " " When can I see you to-morrow? " 

" I'll take your offer for those bonds." . . . And I could see the 
interiors of innumerable offices and drawing-rooms. . . . But, 



48 THE WORKER AND HIS WORK 

of course, I could hear and see nothing really except the intent drone 
and quick gesturing of those completely absorbed young creatures in 
the dim radiance, on stools precisely similar. 

I understood why the telephone service was so efficient. I under- 
stood not merely from the demeanor of the long row of young 
women, but from everything else I had seen in the exact and diabol- 
ically ingenious ordering of the whole establishment. 

We were silent for a time, as though we had entered a church. 
We were, perhaps unconsciously, abashed by the intensity of the 
absorption of these neat young women. After a while one of the 
guides, one of the inscrutable beings who had helped to invent and 
construct the astounding organism, began in a low voice on the 
forlorn hope of making me comprehend the mechanism of a tele- 
phone-call and its response. And I began on the forlorn hope of 
persuading him by intelligent acting that I did comprehend. We 
each made a little progress. I could not tell him that, though I 
genuinely and humbly admired his particular variety of genius, what 
interested me in the affair was not the mechanics, but the human 
equation. As a professional reader of faces, I glanced as well as I 
could sideways at those bent girls' faces to see if they were happy. 
An absurd inquiry! Do / look happy when I'm at work, I wonder! 
Did they then look reasonably content? Well, I came to the con- 
clusion that they looked like most other faces — neither one thing nor 
the other. Still, in a great establishment, I would sooner search for 
sociological information in the faces of the employed than in the 
managerial rules. 

" What do they earn? " I asked, when we emerged from the 
ten-atmosphere pressure of that intense absorption. (Of course, I 
knew that no young woman could possibly for any length of time 
be as intensely absorbed as these appeared to be. But the illusion 
was there, and it was effective.) 

I learned that even the lowest beginner earned five dollars a 
week. It was just the sum I was paying for a pair of clean sheets 
every night at a grand hotel. And that the salary rose to six, seven, 
eight, eleven, and even fourteen dollars for supervisors, who, how- 
ever, had to stand on their feet seven and a half hours a day, as 
shopgirls do for ten hours a day; and that in general the girls had 
thirty minutes for lunch, and a day off every week, and that the 
company supplied them gratuitously with tea, coffee, sugar, couches. 



THE AMERICAN TELEPHONE 49 

newspapers, arm-chairs, and fresh air, of which last fifty fresh cubic 
feet were pumped in for every operator every minute. 

" Naturally," I was told, '' the discipline is strict. There are 
test wires. . . . We can check the ' time elements.' . . . We 
keep a record of every call. They'll take a dollar a week less in an 
outside place — for instance, a hotel. . . . Their average stay here 
is thirty months.'* 

And I was told the number of exchanges there were in New York, 
exactly like the one I was seeing. 

A dollar a week less in a hotel! How feminine! And how 
masculine! And how wise for one sort of young woman, and how 
foolish for another! . . . Imagine quitting that convent with its 
guaranteed fresh air, and its couches and sugar and so on, for the 
rough hazards and promiscuities of a hotel! On the other hand, 
imagine not quitting it! 

Said the demigod of the electrical world, condescendingly: "All 
this telephone business is done on a mere few hundred horse-power. 
Come away, and I'll show you electricity in bulk." 

And I went away with him, thoughtful. In spite of the inhuman 
perfection of its functioning, that exchange was a very human place 
indeed. It brilliantly solved some problems; it raised others. Exces- 
sively difficult to find any fault whatever in it! A marvelous service, 
achieved under strictly hygienjc conditions — and young women 
must make their way through the world! And yet — ^yes, a very 
human place indeed! 



THE TELEPHONE DIRECTORY 

By Berton Braley 

What is there seeming duller than this book, 
This stolid volume of prosaic print? 
And yet it is a glass through which we look 
On wonderland and marvels without stint. 
It is a key which will unlock the gate 
Of distance and of time and circumstance, 
A wand that makes the wires articulate 
With hum of trade and whisper of romance! 

Somewhere there is enchantment in each page — 

The whirr of wheels, the murmurs of the mart, 

The myriad mighty voices of the age, 

The throbbing of the great world's restless heart, — 

Such are the sounds this volume seems to store 

For him who feels the magic of its thrall, 

Who views the vistas it unrolls before 

His eyes that scarce can comprehend them all! 

Here is the guide to all the vast extent 

The wires have bound together, this will show 

The way to help when need is imminent. 

When terror threatens or when life bums low; 

This brings the lover to his heart's desire. 

That he may speak to her o'er hill and lea. 

This is the secret of the singing wire. 

To all the " world without " this is the key! 

From Songs of a Workaday World, by Berton Braley. Copyright, 
191 5, George H. Doran Company, Publishers. 
50 



SPARKS OF THE WIRELESS 

By Walter Sanders Hiatt 

The youths of the world are running away to sea again. 

But yesterday the sea had lost its romance, had become a place 
of prosaic traveling from an icy port to a hot one, with the tying 
up at the coal-blackened dock the most fanciful adventure of the 
voyage. The pirates, alas! had gone to work. There was naught 
left of the wondrous days of old but the yarns found in the pages 
of " The Pilot," " Peter Simple," " Treasure Island." The American 
lad had quit the sea these thirty years. It had hardly kept a place 
in his dreams; and the word was being passed that the white lad 
the world around was forgetting the sea. 

Lo! a tiny dot, a dash or two, cuts through the air, over the sea, 
and all is changed — once more as it should be. To the sea was thus 
reclaimed enchanted, wandering fancy, and to-day thousands of 
American, English, German, French, and Italian youths are again 
treading the heaving deck on the high sea. 

The new lad aboard ship is Sparks. He may be nineteen and lay 
claim to one-and-twenty; he may have hoped to begin life as an 
Indian-fighter. 

But wireless has made of him a spanking ship's operator, one 
who dreams of ether waves and transmitters, condensers, trans- 
formers, and anchor spark gaps; an operator who can, if need there 
be, speak a language for any tongue, play a tune on his antenna that 
will ride out the most terrible of gales, bring succor to the weakest 
ship, snatch its prey from the wildest sea. 

Sparks is not tied down in restive captivity to one port or ship. 
His power is only short of divine. He may leap over the sea and 
the mountains, where he listeth. If there are no messages to send for 
captain or passenger, if the steady brightness of the stars blooming 
above and the regular roar of the waves broken under the bow make 
the watch to drag, he may call up a friend hundreds of miles to lee- 
ward, ask the latest news from home, make plans to meet at port 

By permission. From Scribne/s Magaslne for April, 191 4. Copy- 
righted, 1914, by Charles Scribner's Sons. 

51 



52 THE WORKER AND HIS WORK 

six months hence and have a jolly lark ashore, when confidences can 
be exchanged without every gossiper afloat and every amateur on 
land listening in. 

A fellow doesn't mind telling the whole world about the perse- 
cutions of the skipper and the bad bunking and worse food on board 
— but there are some things to be kept sacred. Girls? Of course not ! 

If perchance Sparks is ploughing Pacific waters, say on a tramp 
bound around the Horn, laden deep with grain and no port to 
make in the ten thousand miles this side of Dunkirk, he may break 
the monotony of marmalade and toast, scowling skipper and raging 
waves, by calling up the station on the island of Juan Fernandez, 
off the coast of Chile, and ask after Robinson Crusoe's goats, his 
vine-clad fort, his boats, and all the rest so plainly set down on 
printed page. 

Truly, what a wonderful life leads Sparks, and truly, what a 
wonderful fellow he is! 

A right bold sea-dog is Sparks and he leads the captain a sad 
life. Is it Sparks or is it the captain who commands the ship? 

" Why, sir, I'm growing old before my time, what with reports 
and owner's complaints, cargo that shifts, logs that read awry," 
grumbled one Old Man. " And now I have this to look after. A 
fellow comes aboard my ship and by the swagger of him I'm but 
an air wave." 

It is when skippers are in such frame of mind that poor Sparks 
learns why so many other boys quit going to sea in the good old days. 

Because a fellow happens to be in a hurry, to forget that the 
skipper is a high and mighty person, and asks him offhand, " I say, 
captain, do you want to send out any dope to-night? " that is no 
reason to set you to pacing the deck in a disgraceful rope ring for an 
hour, with an added quarter each time you touch a ventilator or 
the rail. I should say not! 

Then, there are times when no self-respecting fellow can hold 
his tongue. Take the case of Cameron. He showed the Old Man 
of the Iroquois how to respect a Wifeless operator. Cameron is 
known from Point Barrow to the ice barriers of the Antarctic as a 
competent operator. The night he left that old tub in Seattle, she 
had taken on a whole deck-load of sheep. Sheep were even stowed 
about the Wireless cabin. Tfcere was a holy stench, let me tell you. 
Cameron wasn't to blame. 



SPARKS OF THE WIRELESS 53 

So he up and tells the Old Man that them sheep has got to 
come from around his cabin. Did not his contract call for a first-class 
berth? Well, the Iroquois was just about to cast off her lines, ready 
for sea. " The tide is making, sir," the first was bellowing from the 
fo'c's'le head when Cameron went to the bridge. 

^' If you're not suited aboard my ship, Mr. Cameron," says the 
Old Man, " why, you can take your things and go ashore and con- 
found you! " But he was that put out, he went to Cameron's cabin 
and helped him get his things ashore. He afterward bragged he 
threw Cameron, " his umbrella, his valise, coats, pants, and collars, 
all in a heap, right over the side upon the dock." Anyway, it was not 
what you would call a friendly parting. 

" You lack manners, sir," shouted Cameron when he got to the 
dock. Those were his very words. My! how mad they made 
that skipper! 

It must be that skippers are jealous. When they are about to 
wreck their ships, it is always the Wireless men that save them. 
Then the passengers and the newspapers tell how Sparks acted like 
a hero. That's the way it is. 

Take the eighty passengers of the C amino. They know how to 
appreciate fellows like Cameron. After clearing from Portland, ten 
miles off Astoria she ran into a stiff southerly gale which was soon 
banging away at the rate of eighty miles an hour, and God help the 
vessel in its path! Waves piled up, swept the battened decks, 
wrecked and carried away the winches and all the tackle forward. 
The passengers gathered in the saloon, praying and weeping, while 
the storm raged. The steady plunging forward of the ship, lifting 
her heels out of water, kept the screw spinning in vacant air so 
viciously it finally broke short off and dropped to the bottom. 

Then the despised Sparks was told to call for help, to send out 
the S.O.S. of distress. With the ship drifting and the waves breaking 
over broadside, when it was worth your life to go on deck. Sparks 
repaired his disabled antenna; he braved each bolt of lightning, apt 
to dart down his wires to the head-phones and strike him senseless 
at the key. 

Finally, forth into the air sputtered the call that brought the 
Watson. The Camino was towed into San Francisco harbor, with 
every soul safe on board. You bet those passengers were glad. 
They voted Sparks the ablest seaman of the lot and his antenna 



54 THE WORKER AND HIS WORK 

wires, stretched from masthead to masthead, the handsomest part 
of the ship. 

It^s in such times as this that Sparks loves to go to sea. Even 
the Old Man is then his friend. Though the brave captain may he 
broken-hearted at the thought of losing his commission for not 
having done more than human could do, he is sure to speak a good 
word for Sparks at the company offices. 

The running away of Sparks to sea, however, is not done to-day 
as formerly. If bred on this side of the water, he cannot jump over 
the back-yard fence and make for the nearest ship. He must quiet 
the fever in his veins, still the quick heart-beat that brings the 
sparkle to the eye and the bloom to the cheek, until he has passed 
certain school examinations. But such a school! 

The uninitiated peeping in would mistake the scholars for appren- 
tice divers, arrayed as they are with helmet-like head-pieces. A 
glimpse reveals the yearning of these youth to become operators. 
The generators and dynamos, booming and cracking as they feed the 
wires with the electric currents that pass into the ether as pebbles in 
a pool, would alone capture the youthful imagination. 

Then, there are other bewildering pieces of apparatus — telegraph- 
keys, switches, tuners, automatic message-stampers, circuit diagrams 
— on the walls maps of the world splashed with red dots of wireless 
stations, charts to show the position of all ships at sea. 

Since the passage of laws by nations requiring two operators 
aboard passenger-ships, to take watch and watch about, a dozen 
schools have been established to train operators. These schools are 
in Germany, in France, in England. In the United States there 
are no less than half a dozen. Some of these schools are maintained 
by the commercial companies supplying ships with equipment and 
men. The United States Navy maintains one at Brooklyn, another 
at San Francisco, and in both government licenses are granted to any 
amateur or professional operator, after a rigid examination. 

Wireless is a veritable disease with the American student. Some 
of them, long before entering these schools, work at all sorts of 
jobs, whitewashing neighbors' fences, carrying coals, running errands, 
to get money to build their own amateur stations. In cities, where 
landlords are captious and refuse to let antenna wires mingle with 
clothes-lines on the roofs, the boys not infrequently use brass bed- 
steads in the attics as antennae. 



SPARKS OF THE WIRELESS SS 

So going to a wireless school is dearer than play to them. Mother 
may have intended Sparks for a minister, father for a drug clerk, 
and uncle for a grocery man; but no bond can bind such a heart's 
desire. It is students of such fervor that are sought to enlist in the 
navy or sign contracts with the commercial companies. 

At the school there is constant practice in distress signalling. 
The ship in distress is by rule entirely in charge of the situation and 
must not be interfered with, not spoken to unless in reply to mes- 
sages. Thus, the Sparks in distress sends out: " S.O.S., K.P.N.," the 
last three letters being his ship letter. He collects his answers, selects 
the ship nearest, tells others to stand by and others to proceed. This 
team-work is exacting, sometimes exciting to distraction. 

One day a new Sparks related this awful tale of woe: " We have 
sunk by the head. All on board lost." 

" Send us a letter about it, then," answered a facetious operator. 
After two or three months at the school, attending lectures on 
electromagnetism, wireless engineering, learning the Continental 
code, the repair of equipment under difficulties. Sparks goes up for 
his license. The examination is in deadly earnest, too. He must 
know as much about Wireless as captains and pilots of ship naviga- 
tion. A not unimportant requirement of the license is secrecy in 
respect to all messages. Once the license is granted, if he elects the 
merchant-ship trade, he signs on with a commercial company at a 
beginner's salary of thirty dollars a month and all found. 

Then it's ho! and away for the wide ports of romance. He goes 
as assistant to a chief Sparks, to be sure, but he goes. He explores 
all the mysteries of the ship, of the seas, and the islands and lands 
bordering thereupon. The sea becomes his home, with the land as 
an excuse for stopping now and again. He learns how to walk with 
a tremendous roll, to speak lightly of mountain waves, to smoke 
black cigars of Havana, the lighter ones of Sumatra, to drink 
Madeira wines, to eat green cocoanuts and bananas and yet live; he 
learns to forget, too, the dusty front of Marseilles, the lonely, dreary 
weeks around the Cape. War, famine, luxurj^, shipwreck, are all 
taken in good part. 

There was the investigating Sparks who went ashore to see the 
sights at Tampico. The " static " of the atmosphere was such that 
he could not talk with friends at sea, the ship was no place to stop, 
what with the heat, the mess made by the loading of sugar, the noise 



56 THE WORKER AND HIS WORK 

of the winches, and the bustle of getting her ready for sea. Going 
ashore, Sparks met a mate who told him he should ride up-coimtry 
to visit the grave of a dead patriot and buried hero. 

Sparks went to a livery man. Did he have a nice mount? Did 
he? He had the swiftest, the gentlest, the most docile donkey ever 
bred outside of Spain. So Sparks mounted and plunged inland, 
until he reached the graveside, hidden by coarse grass, overrun with 
ants and scorpions and beetles. He reverently began to copy the 
inscription in his note-book: *' Que sea su juez Dios" (Let God 
be his judge) . 

While Sparks was stooping, better to read the rest, the swiftest, 
gentlest donkey, possibly being of a different political faith from the 
patriot, gayly kicked up his heels, tossed poor Sparks to earth, and 
bent his way homeward. Sparks, failing of finding another mount, 
reached the city next morning, footsore and worn, to find that his 
ship had sailed without him. Did he rail at the heartless skipper? 
Not he. " Let God be his judge," he declared sententiously and set 
about seeking, without too much concern, a berth on a ship bound 
for New York, there to report for another ship at the home office. 

The spirit of voyages never-ending, of adventures impossible, 
hovers about the traffic-manager's office, whence operators meet and 
are assigned to ships. 

" Hello! Jenkins. So youVe the man I've been talking to these 
three years and never yet set eyes upon. That's a great yam you 
told me down in the Caribbean about the Kingston negro who got 
a shock walking under the antenna with a steel cane. ..." 

" Well! well! well! And this is the sport I landed in the busi- 
ness. I hear you handed it to the Old Man when he asked you to 
call up the Don Juan de Austria and beg the loan of the key to the 
keelson. What was your answer? I remember now. You told him 
you were busy frying flying-fish on your antenna for supj>er, and 
when you got that little job finished, you intended to find out what 
became of the waste ether dots. I guess he found you weren't so 
green, at that. . . ." 

" Boys! look at the bulletin-board! ' The next operator reported 
at this office for swearing anywhere within three hundred miles of 
the port of New York will be severely dealt with. All improper 
conversation among operators must cease/ Listen to this: * Please 
note that the s/s Kiruna, call letters S.F.N., of the Rederiaktiebolaget 



SPARKS OF THE WIRELESS 57 

Lulea-Ofoten, has been equipped with wireless apparatus, to be 
operated by the Societe Anonyme Internationale de Telegraphie Sans 
Fil.' Here's more of the same: ' Please note that the call letter of 
the s/s Bahia Castillo of the Hamburg sud-Amerikanische Damp- 
schiffahrts Gesellschaft is D.B.K.' They hand us stuff like this to 
remember and then they wonder why fellows get mad and let 
off steam. . . ." 

" When I was at Calcutta, I did a good turn for an old fakir and 
he took a shine to me. He said he'd let me know when he died. That 
was three years ago and, will you believe me, this voyage home, a 
tiiousand miles at sea, he rung a bell — the astral bell! — right in my 
cabin, and told me he was dying. He knew the code all right. . . . 
Well, if you fellows won't believe me. . . . It's true. No ghost 
story at all. . . ." 

" Yes, the lad at Fame Point died. They said he had heart trouble. 
/ believe it was pure homesickness, that's what I believe. . . ." 

" He was always a queer sort. When he got the message of his 
mother's death, he wrote it right out and started to deliver it to a 
passenger. He didn't know it was for him, couldn't believe it. You 
see, his mother had just been planning to have him stop ashore at 
home with her for a spell around Christmas-time. He had not been 
home for a year and more. . . ." 

While the chatter is running along in this wise, a lad comes 
tramping in, the fresh mists of the sea still clinging about his face. 
His ship, the Santa Rosalia, has come to port, via Seattle, the Straits 
of Magellan, Buenos Ayres, Bordeaux, and Liverpool. She is going 
into dry dock for two or three weeks. So he is packed off to take a 
passenger-ship to Bermuda. " Glory be! " he shouts, in full joy. 
This is the first time he has had a passenger-ship for a year. He 
makes for his cabin on the freighter, expresses some French laces 
and curio to mother and sister, packs up, and goes to his new ship — 
is off for flirtations on the sly, to answer foolish questions in pretty 
mouths about Wireless. 

A strapping man comes in from the navy-yard. He is almost 
nineteen, has just passed his license examination, and is yearning 
for a ship. He can speak French, so he is assigned to the Themis- 
tocles, sailing on the morrow for Grecian ports, to carry volunteers 
to the war. He rushes home to pack. 

" To the war, mother! Think of the fun I'll have! " What 



58 THE WORKER AND HIS WORK 

mother thinks is something quite different. But these mothers are 
brave. She slips, unawares, a little book of prayers among his 
things, sees that he has plenty of clean clothes, kisses her boy, and 
makes him promise to be good. " And do write me often, son," she 
begs on the door-step. What letters they are that these mothers 
get! How their hearts tremble at the reading 

" Well, we got there and put guns on our ship and they made me 
a naval operator. We had a fight and they run us ashore, but I sent 
a wireless and one of our ships came and chased them away. An- 
other time the Turks got us and put irons on me and I thought they 
were going to shoot us but they didn't because we got exchanged 
and now I am back on another ship. So everything is all right. You 
needn't worry «bout me though I do wish I had some more 
clean clothes. . . ." 

It's only when you go to war that a fellow takes a chance. Of 
course. The sea is safe if you are in a safe ship. All the Sparkses 
afloat write this assurance home to mother from every port. They 
leave untold the stories of the brawlers who lie in wait at dark 
comers, in the foul alley-ways, who strip men of the ship and throw 
their bodies into the quiet river. They forget about the collision, the 
blow amidships some foggy night, when a ship goes to the bottom 
like a rock. 

Take the case of the steamer Narrung. Sparks had to leave 
mother the very day before Christmas. It was the fault of the Old 
Man, who hurried the longshoremen in loading her. But he got paid 
back for it. After she left Tilbury dock, bound for the Cape and 
Australia, she had head winds in the Channel and worse ones outside. 
In the Bay of Biscay the green seas began sweeping the ship from 
stem to stem. Twenty miles off Ushant, all hands thought she 
would founder, surely. 

It was a time to pick your own burying-ground, with a shroud 
of brine. Her iron decks forward ripped up and crumpled back 
before the force of those waves like so much tinfoil. Truly an honest 
man's weather. There was no turning her about in the teeth of 
that gale. The Old Man told Sparks to send out his S.O.S. It was 
freezing cold, so cold that he had to hold one hand to steady the 
other. The ship was pitching so that his wave metres varied every 
thirty seconds. But he got his auxiliary set working and shoved out 
that message just the same. The Bavaria and the Nevada answered 



SPARKS OF THE WIRELESS 59 

and this gave the Old Fussy his nerve back. He'd rather drown 
and go to the bottom than pay salvage. So he began turning that 
ship about. Before that gale and those waves breaking over, the 
Narrung reeled so the lookout came just short of dropping from 
the crow's-nest. There was an hour and twenty minutes of this 
work and she was got about at last. She proceeded to Graves- 
end harbor. 

Sparks had been on duty and without sleep for fifty hours or 
such matter, but he rolled over the side and went home to spend 
New Year's with mother — which was almost as good as Christmas, 
being unexpected. He told mother the captain caught cold, or forgot 
his watch, or gave some other good reason for putting back. Why 
worry dear mother? 

The iron, never-say-die spirit of the Seven Seas perforce creeps 
into the blood of Sparks. It is a world of give and take, oftener 
taking than giving, and one must learn its ways. Thus, when the 
operators on Sable Island saw the fine ship Eric cast ashore by a 
wild March tempest, one of their number beat through the breakers 
aboard of her with a small wireless outfit — she having none — to trans- 
mit the messages that might yet save her. 

He braved the waves breaking over her, worked like a fury, 
clambered to the masts, strung his antenna, and began sending the 
messages to the Aberdeen^ the Bridgwater, and the Sealy which came 
and stood by, waiting a chance to salvage the ship, or at least save 
her three thousand nine hundred tons of pretty Argentine maize. 
A night and a day this Sparks worked, until the pounding broke the 
Eric in twain and he had to make a rare race back to shore. 

Upon the straightaway dangers of the sea are often piled the 
devious ones of man. Sparks may be set aboard a ship to help save 
her, in time of distress, because, being old and leaky and unsea- 
worthy, with a weak hull or a too heavy engine in her, her owners are 
ashamed to even ask for insurance. Such vessels are often used in 
trading about which no questions should, in all fairness, be asked. 
It may be to the slave coasts or again in sly filibustering expeditions, 
when arms are needed by one band of patriots to quell the ardor of 
another such band. In this latter fall, Sparks is useful in transmitting 
code messages to a friendly Sparks ashore. 

A certain Sparks wears a sparkling diamond as a souvenir of a 
certain voyage in a certain wooden tub, full of leaks and daylight. 



60 THE WORKER AND HIS WORK 

She left New York to carry vegetables to the starving city of Bruns- 
wick, Ga. The vegetables were done up in coffin-like cases, safely 
stowed away in the hold from the observation of a Spanish crew 
that came aboard at the hour of sailing. It was a long voyage down 
the coast and so confusing that the captain brought up in the 
islands near Progresso. 

Sparks was awakened from the fitful slumber of a seething 
tropic night and asked to get in touch with the Sparks ashore. This 
he did. At dawn a swarthy band of little soldiers and politicians 
swarmed aboard. Some of them came and smoked cigarettes with 
Sparks and examined " this thing wire." El general bustled into the 
wireless cabin, while hatches were being broken open below and 
arms distributed. He wanted a message sent. The fate of a nation 
hung by it. Sparks could not get his instrument to work. 

El general danced up and down. " Carrambos! Thees message, 
it is expect! " Sparks located the trouble. The tiny carbon silicon 
detector had been broken by the curious visitors. As he started to 
explain this to el general, he noted that the little brown man wore 
a huge flat diamond in his cravat. Sparks demanded it. The dia- 
mond was carbon, too. El general gave up the diamond and Sparks 
was able to send and receive in good order. " You one great mans! 
I you have saved! " cried the general. Sparks also saved the dia- 
mond. Later he asked the operator on shore when the general would 
return for his jewelry. " Keep it," was the answer. " His soul is 
at rest. He will never claim it." 

The other Sparkses wink slyly when this yam is told. Can it 
be possible that the ancient and honorable fibbing habit of Jack Tar 
is inevitably connected with the sea? 

Odd are the tales cast up by the ether sea. A laborer on Swan 
Island in the Gulf of Mexico, one of the banana chain to the tropics, 
had his foot crushed in a tram-car accident. A surgical operation 
,was necessary, but surgeon there was none. The Sparks of the 
island wireless station had an idea. He sent out a distress call, far 
and wide, which was answered by the Ward Line steamer Esperanza, 
four hundred and twenty miles away. 

He explained his case. Could the ship's doctor help! The 
captain and the ship's doctor held a consultation. It would be a 
pity for the ship to turn from her course and lose thousands of 
dollars by the delay. The losing of a man's life would also be a 



SPARKS OF THE WIRELESS 61 

pity. " Let me handle the case by wireless," volunteered the doctor. 
So he sat himself down in the wireless cabin and sent a call for all 
details of the case. Then, message by message, he directed the way 
to deaden the pain, the amputation of the foot, each stroke of the 
knife, the binding of the arteries to prevent loss of blood, the wash- 
ing of the wound with antiseptics. When the operation was over, 
he kept in touch, by wireless relay from ship to ship, with his patient 
until danger of blood-poisoning was by. 

The Crusoe-like life of Sparks ashore in these out-of-the-way 
comers of the world lacks the changing joys and vicissitudes of 
Ralph Rover afloat. A daily diet of flaming sunsets and sunrises, 
of blue seas and resplendent luxuriance of vegetation, has not the 
compensations of even famine and shipwreck. In the sombre north- 
ern stations the life of Sparks is dreary to a detail. Sometimes rest- 
lessness gets a strangle-hold. 

It was under such urgence that a message of distress was sent out 
by a Sparks from the station at Estevan Point, British Columbia. To 
a vessel answering, he stated that his wife and children were down 
with the fever and that he needed quinine. When the vessel came off 
shore and sent out a boat. Sparks kept the crew overtime — just talk- 
ing. As he could not produce the sick family, the wrothy captain 
reported the matter and Sparks lost his job. But what cared he? 
A wanderer born, he wandered to the Fiji Island station, then to 
New Zealand, and finally back to the Pacific coast. 

The operator at Katella, Fox Island, Alaska, it is related, rather 
than face a winter alone, contrived to keep sixty men marooned on 
the island for a spell. The men were there working for a contem- 
plated railroad when the winter fell too soon, so they could not leave 
overland. Sparks was glad of their company, so glad that he did 
not send out a distress message to bring help for them until famine 
threatened the party. His reluctant S.O.S. brought the old 
steamer Portland. 

Then Sparks wrote in his log, " Left alone for the winter," an act 
which required as much grim courage as that of the captain who seals 
his log with the loss of his ship as the last entry. 

Sparks meets with real adventures now and then, just like those 
of the fellows on a lively shore, in this wandering about the world: 
adventures of the heart, adventures that lead somewhere, that are 
not at once swallowed up in unfathomable air or trackless waste of 



62 THE WORKER AND HIS WORK 

water. If you are the Sparks of a tramp ship, you visit Oporto, 
Barcelona, Palermo, Antwerp, Callao, Montreal, Galveston — ^all the 
queer names in the geography are down as your ports of call. 

Always curious maidens of wondrous beauty come aboard to see 
the wireless wonder. You let one such put on your ear-phones, you 
guide her hand at the sending key. How good and sweet she seems, 
how her presence adorns and purifies that staid, dingy old craft! 
You are invited ashore to church, to dinner. There are songs at the 
piano, the air is all sentiment. She seems yet more good and sweet. 
You tell her so — and there you are! 

Such matters fall out even more frequently at sea aboard the 
passenger-ships. Mothers and giggling daughters come trooping 
merrily along the boat-deck, or the wider, roomier sun-deck. " Ohl 
here^s the wireless room. Simply wonderful, isn't it? May we 
come in? Thanks. What a lot of wire you need to send a wire- 
less message! Hov/ far are we from land? Two miles straight 
down — isn't that a good joke! So that line aft really doesn't steady 
the ship? How curious! Just a fishing-line, and the fish are not 
biting to-day, because it's Friday." 

While they race along in this vein, you note the quiet, brown- 
eyed one by the door who doesn't ask a single question. She's the 
kind of a girl that makes your heart jump. When the others leave, 
you manage to ask her if she really would not like to stay and watch 
the wireless work. You exchange names, you write each other after 
the voyage is over. Finally, you decide to give up this wandering 
over the seas like a sodden derelict. You get a job ashore and settle 
down and live like other fellows. 

Sometimes Sparks quits going to sea for another reason yet. 
These commonplace happenings at sea, called adventures by lands- 
men, take a more serious turn at times, have an import altogether 
uncalculated. A ship grounds in a thick fog on some desolate rock, 
as in the case of the Ohio in Finlayson Channel. 

You keep the antenna cracking out your S.O.S. till the deck is 
awash, till help comes. Then, in the confusion of oaths and cries, 
of rushing to and fro, of frantic, animal-like struggles for safety, as 
you are about to take the last boat, you see a helpless piother or a 
dazed man. 

You stay to lend a hand, there is a slight, staggering, pitching 



SPARKS OF THE WIRELESS 63 

motion of a ship in her last agonies; waves leap and dance about 
you; then a dull, sucking roar. . . . 

Later mother and sweetheart come to bury you, so they say — as 
Eccles of the Ohio at Altamonte, or Phillips of the Titanic at Godal- 
ming — where the water flows and the grass is green; perchance a 
fountained monument is raised in some Battery Park to your 
undying fame. 

You are then gone — as say mother and sweetheart — free to wan- 
der at large, further, in the more mysterious ports of the ether ocean. 



FANNY HERSELF 
By Edna Ferber 

" Mr. Fenger will see you now." Mr. Fenger, general manager, 
had been a long time about it. This heel-cooling experience was 
new to Fanny Brandeis. It had always been her privilege to keep 
others waiting. Still, she felt no resentment as she sat in Michael 
Fenger 's outer office. For as she sat there, waiting, she was getting 
a distinct impression of this unseen man whose voice she could just 
hear as he talked over the telephone in his inner office. It was 
characteristic of Michael Fenger that his personality reached out 
and touched you before you came into actual contact with the man. 
Fanny had heard of him long before she came to Haynes-Cooper. 
He was the genie of that glittering lamp. All through the gigantic 
plant (she had already met department heads, buyers, merchandise 
managers) one heard his name, and felt the impress of his mind: 

" You'll have to see Mr. Fenger about that." 

" Yes," — ^pointing to a new conveyor, perhaps, — " that has just 
been installed. It's a great help to us. Doubles our shipping-room 
efficiency. We used to use baskets, pulled by a rope. It's Mr. 
Fenger's idea." 

Efficiency, efficiency, efficiency. Fenger had made it a slogan 
in the Haynes-Cooper plant long before the German nation forced 
it into our everyday vocabulary. Michael Fenger was System. He 
could take a muddle of orders, a jungle of unfilled contracts, a horde 
of incompetent workers, and of them make a smooth-running and 
effective unit. Untangling snarls was his pastime. Esprit de corps 
was his shibboleth. Order and management his idols. And his 
war-cry was " Results! " 

It was eleven o'clock when Fanny came into his outer office. 
The very atmosphere was vibrant with his personality. There hung 
about the place an air of repressed expectancy. The room was 
electrically charged with the high-voltage of the man in the inner 
office. His secretary was a spare, middle-aged, anxious-looking 
woman in snuff-brown and spectacles; his stenographer a blond 
young man, also spectacled and anxious; his office boy a stern youth 
64 



FANNY HERSELF 65 

in knickers, who bore no relation to the slangy, gum-chewing, red- 
headed office boy of the comic sections. 

The low-pitched, high-powered voice went on inside, talking over 
the long-distance telephone. Fenger was the kind of man who is 
always talking to New York when he is in Chicago, and to Chicago 
when he is in New York. Trains with the word Limited after them 
were invented for him and his type. A buzzer sounded. It gal- 
vanized the office boy into instant action. It brought the anxious- 
looking stenographer to the doorway, note-book in hand, ready. It 
sent the lean secretary out, and up to Fanny. 

" Temper," said Fanny, to herself, " or horribly nervous and 
high-keyed. They jumped like a set of puppets on a string." 

It was then that the lean secretary had said, ^' Mr. Fenger will 
see you now." 

Fanny was aware of a pleasant Httle tingle of excitement. She 
entered the inner office. 

It was characteristic of Michael Fenger that he employed no 
cheap tricks. He was not writing as Fanny Brandeis came in. He 
was not telephoning. He was not doing anything but standing at 
his desk, waiting for Fanny Brandeis. As she came in he looked 
at her, through her, and she seemed to feel her mental processes laid 
open to him as a skilled surgeon cuts through skin and flesh and 
fat, to lay bare the muscles and nerves and vital organs beneath. 
He put out his hand. Fanny extended hers. They met in a silent 
grip. It was like a meeting between two men. Even as he indexed 
her, Fanny's alert mind was busy docketing, numbering, cataloguing 
him. They had in common a certain force, a driving power. Fanny 
seated herself opposite him, in obedience to a gesture. He crossed 
his legs comfortably and sat back in his big desk chair. A great- 
bodied man, with powerful square shoulders, a long head, a rugged 
crest of a nose — the kind you see on the type of Englishman who has 
the imagination and initiative to go to Canada, or Australia, or 
America. He wore spectacles, not the fashionable horn-rimmed sort, 
but the kind with gold ear-pieces. They were becoming, and gave 
a certain humanness to a face that otherwise would have been too 
rugged, too strong. A man of forty-five, perhaps. 

He spoke first. " You're younger than I thought." 

" So are you." 

" Old inside." 
5 



66 THE WORKER AND fflS WORK 

" So am I." 

He uncrossed his legs, leaned forward, folded his arms on the desk. 

" You've been through the plant, Miss Brandeis? " 

" Yes. Twice. Once with a regular tourist party. And once 
with the special guide." 

" Good. Go through the plant whenever you can. Don't stick 
to your own department. It narrows one." He paused a moment. 
" Did you think that this opportunity to come to Haynes-Cooper, as 
assistant to the infants' wear department buyer, was just a piece 
of luck, augmented by a little pulling on your part? " 

" Yes." 

" It wasn't. You were carefully picked by me, and I don't expect 
to find I've made a mistake. I suppose you know very little about 
buying and selling infants' wear? " 

" Less than about almost any other article in the world — at least, 
in the department store, or mail-order world." 

" I thought so. And it doesn't matter. I pretty well know your 
history, which means that I know your training. You're young; 
you're ambitious; you're experienced; you're imaginative. There's 
no length you can't go, with these. It just depends on how far- 
sighted your mental vision is. Now listen, Miss Brandeis: I'm not 
going to talk to you in milHons. The guides do enough of that. 
But you know we do buy and sell in terms of millions, don't you? 
Well, our infants' wear department isn't helping to roll up the mil- 
lions; and it ought to, because there are millions of babies born 
every year, and the golden-spoon kind are in the minority. I've 
decided that the department needs a woman, your kind of a woman. 
Now, as a rule, I never employ a woman when I can, use a man. 
There's only one other woman filling a really important position in 
the merchandise end of this business. That's Ella Monahan, head 
of the glove department, and she's a genius. She is a woman who 
is limited in every other respect — just average; but she knows glove 
materials in a way that's uncanny. I'd rather have a man in her 
place; but I don't happen to know any men glove-geniuses. Tell 
me, what do you think of that etching? " 

Faimy tried — and successfully — not to show the jolt her mind 
had received as she turned to look at the picture to which his finger 
pointed. She got up and strolled over to it, and she was glad her 
suit fitted and hung as it did in the back. 



FANN\' HERSELF 67 

" I don^t like it particularly. I like it less than any other etching 
you have here." The walls were hung with them. '' Of course, you 
understand I know nothing about them. But it's too flowery, isn't 
it, to be good? Too many lines. Like a writer who spoils his effect 
by using too many words." 

Fenger came over and stood beside her, staring at the black and 
white and gray thing in its frame. ''I felt that way, too." He 
stared down at her, then. " Jew? " he asked. 

A breathless instant. " No," said Fanny Brandeis. 

Michael Fenger smiled for the first time. Fanny Brandeis would 
have given everything she had, everything she hoped to be, to be 
able to take back that monosyllable. She was gripped with horror 
at what she had done. She had spoken almost mechanically. And 
yet that monosyllable must have been the fruit of all these months 
of inward struggle and thought. " Now I begin to understand 
you," Fenger went on. " You've decided to lop off all the excres- 
cences, eh? Well, I can't say that I blame you. A woman in busi- 
ness is handicapped enough by the very fact of her sex." He stared 
at her again. " Too bad you're so pretty." 

" I'm not! " said Fanny hotly, like a school-girl. 

*' That's a thing that can't be argued, child. Beauty's sub- 
jective, you know." 

" I don't see what difference it makes, anyway." 

" Oh, yes, you do." He stopped. " Or perhaps you don't, after 
all. I forget how young you are. Well, now, Miss Brandeis, you 
and your woman's mind, and your masculine business experience 
and sense are to be turned loose on our infants' wear department. 
The buyer, Mr. Slosson, is going to resent you. Naturally. I don't 
know whether we'll get results from you in a month, or six months 
or a year. Or ever. But something tells me we're going to get them. 
YouVe lived in a small town most of your life. And we want that 
smaJl-town viewpoint. D'you think you've got it? " 

Fanny was on her own ground here. " If knowing the Wisconsin 
small-town woman, and the Wisconsin farmer womaft— and man, too, 
for that matter— means knowing the Oregon, and Wyoming, and 
Pennsylvania, and Iowa people of the same place, then I've got it." 

"Good! " Michael Fenger stood up. "I'm not going to load 
you down with instructions, or advice. I think I'll let you grope 
3^our own way around, and bump your head a few times. Then 



68 THE WORKER AND HIS WORK 

you'll learn where the low places are. And, Miss Brandeis, remem- 
ber that suggestions are welcome in this plant. We take suggestions 
all the way from the elevator starter to the president." His tone 
was kindly, but not hopeful. 

Fanny was standing, too, her mental eye on the door. But now 
she turned to face him squarely. 

" Do you mean that? " 

" Absolutely." 

" Well, then, I've one to make. Your stock boys and stock girls 
walk miles and miles every day, on every floor of this fifteen-story 
building. I watched them yesterday, filling up the bins, carrying 
orders, covering those enormous distances from one bin to another, 
up one aisle and down the next, to the office, back again. Your 
floors are concrete, or cement, or some such mixture, aren't they? 
I just happened to think of the boy who used to deliver our paper on 
Norris Street, in Winnebago, Wisconsin. He covered his route on 
roller skates. It saved him an hour. Why don't you put roller 
skates on your stock boys and girls? " 

Fenger stared at her. You could almost hear that mind of 
his working, like a thing on ball bearings. "Roller skates." It 
wasn't an exclamation. It was a decision. He pressed a buzzer — 
the smiff-brown secretary buzzer. " Tell Clancy I want him. Now." 
He had not glanced up, or taken his eyes from Fanny. She was 
aware of feeling a little imcomfortable, but elated, too. She moved 
toward the door. Fenger stood at his desk. " Wait a minute." 
Fanny waited. Still Fenger did not speak. Finally, " I suppose you 
know you've earned six months' salary in the last five minutes." 

Fanny eyed him coolly. " Considering the number of your stock 
force, the time, energy, and labor saved, including wear and tear 
on department heads and their assistants, I should say that was a 
conservative statement." And she nodded pleasantly, and left him. 

Two days later every stock clerk in the vast plant was equipped 
with light-weight roller skates. They made a sort of carnival of it 
at first. There were some spills, too, going aroimd, corners, and a 
little too much hilarity. That wore off in a week. In two weeks their 
roller skates were part of them; just shop labor-savers. The report 
presented to Fenger was this: Time and energy saved, fifty-five per 
cent.; stock staff decreased by one-third. The picturesqueness of 
it, the almost ludicrous simplicity of the idea appealed to the entire 



FANNY HERSELF 69 

plant. It tickled the human sense in every one of the ten thousand 
employees in that vast organization. In the first week of her asso- 
ciation with Haynes-Cooper Fanny Brandeis was actually more 
widely known than men who had worked there for years. The 
president, Nathan Haynes himself, sent for her, chuckling. 

Nathan Haynes — ^but, then, why stop for him? Nathan Haynes 
had been swallowed, long ago, by this monster plant that he himself 
had innocently created. You must have visited it, this Gargantuan 
thing that sprawls its length in the very center of Chicago, the giant 
son of a surprised father. It is one of the city's show places, like 
the stockyards, the Art Institute, and Field^s. Fifteen years before, a 
building had been erected to accommodate a prosperous mail-order 
business. It had been built large and roomy, with plenty of seams, 
planned amply, it was thought, to allow the boy to grow. It would 
do for twenty-five years, surely. In ten years Haynes-Cooper was 
bursting its seams. In twelve it was shamelessly naked, its arms and 
legs sticking out of its inadequate garments. New red brick buildings 
— another — another. Five stories adde^ to this one, six stories to 
that, a new fifteen-story merchandise building. 

The firm began to talk in tens of millions. Its stock became gilt- 
edged, unattainable. Lucky ones who had bought of it diffidently, 
discreetly, with modest visions of four and a half per cent, in their 
unimaginative minds, saw their dividends doubling, trebling, quad- 
rupling, finally soaring gymnastically beyond all reason. Listen to 
the old guide who (at fifteen a week) talces groups of awed visitors 
through the great plant. How he juggles figures; how grandly they 
roll off his tongue. How glib he is with Nathan Haynes's millions. 

" This, ladies and gentlemen, is our mail department. From two 
thousand to twenty-five hundred pounds of mail, comprising over 
one hundred thousand letters, are received here every day. Yes, 
madam, I said every day. About half of these letters are orders. 
Last year the banking department counted one hundred and thirty 
millions of dollars. One hundred and thirty millions! " He stands 
there in his ill-fitting coat, and his star, and rubs one bony hand 
over the other. 

" Dear me! '^ says a lady tourist from Idaho, rather inadequately. 
And yet, not so inadequately. What exclamation is there, please, 
that fits a sum like one hundred and thirty millions of anything? 

Fanny Brandeis, fresh from Winnebago, Wisconsin, slipped into 



70 THE WORKER AND HIS WORK 

the great sclieme of things at the Haynes-Cooper plant like part 
of a perfectly planned blue-print. It was as though she had been 
thought out and shaped for this particular corner. And the reason 
for it was, primarily, Winnebago, Wisconsin. For Haynes-Cooper 
grew and thrived on just such towns, with their surrounding farms 
and villages. Haynes-Cooper had their fingers on the pulse and heart 
of the country as did no other industry. They were close, close. 
When rugs began to take the place of ingrain carpets it was Haynes- 
Cooper who first sensed the change. Oh, they had had them in 
New York years before, certainly. But after all, it isn't New York's 
artistic progress that shows the development of this nation. It is 
the thing they are thinking, and doing, and learning in Backwash, 
Nebraska, that marks time for these United States. There may be 
a certain significance in the announcement that New York has 
dropped the Russian craze and has gone in for that quaint 
Chinese stuff. My dear, it makes the loveliest hangings and decora- 
tions. When Fifth Avenue takes down its filet lace and eyelet 
embroidered curtains, and substitutes severe shantung and chaste net, 
there is little in the act to revolutionize industry, or stir the art- 
world. But when the Haynes-Cooper company, by referring to its 
inventory ledgers, learns that it is selling more Alma Gluck than 
Harry Lauder records; when its statistics show that Tchaikowsky is 
going better than Irving Berlin, something epochal is happening in 
the musical progress of a nation. And when the orders from Noose 
Gulch, Nevada, are for those pladn dimity curtains instead of the 
cheap and gaudy Nottingham atrocities, there is conveyed to the mind 
a fact of immense, of overwhelming significance. The country has 
taken a step toward civilization and good taste. 

So. You have a skeleton sketch of Haynes-Cooper, whose feelers 
reach the remotest dugout in the Yukon, the most isolated cabin in 
the Rockies, the loneliest ranch-house in Wyoming; the Montana 
mining shack, the bleak Maine farm, the plantation in Virginia. 

And the man who had so innocently put life into this monster? 
A plumpish, kindly-faced man; a bewildered, gentle, unimaginative 
and somewhat frightened man, fresh-cheeked, eye-glassed. In his 
suite of offices in the new Administration Building — built two years 
ago — marble and oak throughout — twelve stories, and we're adding 
three already; offices all two- toned rugs, and leather upholstery, 
with dim, rich, brown- toned Dutch masterpieces on the walls, he 




LE MARTELEUR. BY CONSTANTIN MEUNIER 



FANNY HERSELF 71 

sat helpless and defenseless while the torrent of millions rushed, and 
swirled, and foamed about him. I think he had fancied, fifteen 
years ago, that he would some day be a fairly prosperous man; 
not rich, as riches are counted nowadays, but with a comfortable 
number of tens of thousands tucked away. Two or three hun- 
dred thousand; perhaps five hundred thousand! — ^perhaps a — but, 
nonsense! Nonsense! 

And then the thing had started. It was as when a man idly 
throws a pebble into a chasm, or shoves a bit of ice with the toe of 
his boot, and starts a snow-slide that grows as it goes. He had 
started this avalanche of money, and now it rushed on of its own 
momentum, plunging, rolling, leaping, crasliing, and as it swept on 
it gathered rocks, trees, stones, houses, everything that lay in its 
way. It was beyond the power of human hand to stop this tumbling, 
roaring slide. In the midst of it sat Nathan Haynes, deafened, 
stunned, terrified at the immensity of what he had done. 

He began giving away huge sums, incredible sums. It piled up 
faster than he could give it away. And so he sat there in the office 
hung with the dim old masterpieces, and tried to keep simple, tried 
to keep sane, with that austerity that only mad wealth can afford — 
or bitter poverty. He caused the land about the plant to be laid 
out in sunken gardens and baseball fields and tennis courts, so that 
one approached this monster of commerce through enchanted grounds, 
glowing with tulips and heady hyacinths in spring, with roses in 
June, blazing with salvia and golden-glow and asters in autumn. 
There was something apologetic about these grounds. 

This, then, was the environment that Fanny Brandeis had 
chosen. On the face of things you would have said she had chosen 
well. The inspiration of the roller skates had not been merely a lucky 
flash. That idea had been part of the consistent whole. Her mind 
was her mother^s mind raised to the nth power, and enhanced by 
the genius she was trying to crush. Refusing to die, it found expres- 
sion in a hundred brilliant plans, of which the roller-skate idea was 
only one. 



THE EMPORIUM 
By Herbert George Wells 

When Kipps left New Romney, with a small yellow tin box, 
a still smaller portmanteau, a new umbrella, and a keepsake half- 
sixpence, to become a draper, he was a youngster of fourteen, thin, 
with whimsical drakes' tails at the poll of his head, smallish features, 
and eyes that were sometimes very light and sometimes very dark, 
gifts those of his birth; and by the nature of his training he was 
indistinct in his speech, confused in his mind, and retreating in his 
manners. Inexorable fate had appointed him to serve his country 
in commerce, and the same national bias towards private enterprise 
and leaving bad alone, which entrusted his general education to 
Mr. Woodrow, now indentured him firmly into the hands of Mr. 
Shalford, of the Folkestone Drapery Bazaar. Apprenticeship is still 
the recognized English way to the distributing branch of the social 
service. If Mr. Kipps had been so unfortunate as to have been born 
a German he might have been educated in an elaborate and costly 
special school (" over-educated-crammed-up " — Old Kipps) to fit 
him for his end — such being their pedagogic way. He might . . . 
But why make unpatriotic reflections in a novel? There was nothing 
pedagogic about Mr. Shalford. 

He was an irascible, energetic little man, with hairy hands, for 
the most part under his coat-tails, a long, shiny, bald head, a pointed, 
aquiline nose a little askew, and a neatly trimmed beard. He walked 
lightly and with a confident jerk, and he was given to humming. He 
had added to exceptional business " push," bankruptcy under the 
old dispensation, and judicious matrimony. His establishment was 
now one of the most considerable in Folkestone, and he insisted on 
every inch of frontage by alternate stripes of green and yellow down 
the houses over the shops. His shops were numbered 3, 5 and 7 
on the street, and on his billheads 3 to 7. He encoimtered the abashed 
and awe-stricken Kipps with the praises of his system and himself. 
He spread himself out behind his desk with a grip on the lapel of his 
coat and made Kipps a sort of speech. " We expect y V to work, y'r 
know, and we expect y'r to study our interests," explained Mr. 
72 



THE EMPORIUM 73 

Shalford in the regal and commercial plural. " Our system here is the 
best system y'r could have. I made it, and I ought to know. I 
began at the very bottom of the ladder when I was fourteen, and 
there isn't a step in it I don't know. Not a step. Mr. Booch in the 
desk will give y'r the card of rules and fines. Jest wait a minute." 
He pretended to be busy with some dusty memoranda under a paper- 
weight, while Ejpps stood in a sort of paralysis of awe regarding 
his new master's oval baldness. " Two thous'n' three forty-seven 
pounds," whispered Mr. Shalford audibly, feigning forgetfulness of 
Kipps. Clearly a place of great transactions! 

Mr. Shalford rose, and handing Kipps a blotting pad and an ink- 
pot to carry — mere symbols of servitude, for he made no' use of 
them — emerged into a counting-house where three clerks had been 
feverishly busy ever since his door handle had turned. " Booch," 
said Mr. Shalford, " 'ave y'r copy of the rules? " and a down-trodden, 
shabbly little old man, with a ruler in one hand and a quill pen in his 
mouth, silently held out a small book with green and yellow covers, 
mainly devoted, as Kipps presently discovered, to a voracious system 
of fines. He became acutely aware that his hands were full, and 
that everybody was staring at him. He hesitated a moment before 
putting the ink-pot down to free a hand. 

" Mustn't fumble like that," said Mr. Shalford as Kipps pocketed 
the rules. " Won't do here. Come along, come along," and he 
cocked his coat-tails high, as a lady might hold up her dress, and led 
the way into the shop. 

A vast interminable place it seemed to Kipps, with unending 
shining counters and innumerable faultlessly dressed young men 
and presently Houri-like young women staring at him. Here there 
was a long vista of gloves dangling from overhead rods, there rib- 
bons and baby-linen. A short young lady in black mittens was 
making out the account of a customer, and was clearly confused in 
her addition by Shalford's eagle eye. 

A thick-set young man with a bald head and a round, very wise 
face, who was profoundly absorbed in adjusting all the empty chairs 
down the counter to absolutely equal distances, woke out of his 
preoccupation and answered respectfully to a few Napoleonic and 
quite unnecessary remarks from his employer. Kipps was told that 
this young man's name was Mr. Buggins, and that he was to do 
wHrtever Mr. Buggins told him to do. 



74 THE WORKER AND HIS WORK 

They came round a corner into a new smell, which was destined 
to be the smell of Kipps' life for many years, the vague, distinctive 
smell of Manchester goods. A fat man with a large nose jumped — 
actually jumped — at their appearance, and began to fold a pattern 
of damask in front of him exactly like an automaton that is sud- 
denly set going. 

" Carshot, see to this boy to-morrow," said the master. " See he 
don't fumble, Smart'n 'im up." 

" Yussir," said Carshot fatly, glanced at Kipps, and resumed his 
pattern-folding with extreme zeal. 

" Whatever Mr. Carshot says y'r to do, ye do!' said Mr. Shal- 
ford, trotting onward; and Carshot blew out his face with an ap- 
pearance of relief. 

They crossed a large room full of the strangest things Kipps had 
ever seen. Ladylike figures, surmounted by black wooden knobs in 
the place of the refined heads one might have reasonably expected, 
stood about with a lifelike air of conscious fashion. 

" Costume room," said Shalford. 

Two voices engaged in some sort of argument — " I can assure you, 
Miss Mergle, you are entirely mistaken — entirely, in supposing I 
should do anything so unwomanly," — sank abruptly, and they dis- 
covered two young ladies, taller and fairer than any of the other 
young ladies, and with black trains to their dresses, who were en- 
gaged in writing at a little table. Whatever they told him to do, 
Kipps gathered he was to do. He was also, he understood, to do 
whatever Carshot and Booch told him to do. And there were also 
Buggins and Mr. Shalford. And not to forget or fumble! 

They descended into a cellar called " The Warehouse," and 
Kipps had an optical illusion of errand boys fighting. Some aerial 
voice said, "Teddy! " and the illusion passed. He looked again, 
and saw quite clearly that they were packing parcels and always 
would be, and that the last thing in the world that they would or 
could possibly do was to fight. Yet he gathered from the remarks 
Mr. Shalford addressed to their busy backs that they had been 
fighting — no doubt at some past period of their lives. 

Emerging in the shop again among the litter of toys and what 
are called " fancy articles," Shalford withdrew a hand from beneath 
his coat-tails to indicate an overhead change-carrier. He entered 
into elaborate calculations to show how many minutes in one year 



THE EMPORIUM 75 

were saved thereby, and lost himself among the figures. " Seven 
turns eight seven nine — was it? Or seven eight nine? Now, now! 
Why, when I was a boy your age I c'd do a sum like that as soon as 
hear it. We'll soon get y'r into better shape than that. Make you 
Fishent. Well, y'r must take my word, it comes to pounds and 
pounds saved in the year — pounds and pounds. System! System 
everywhere. Fishency." He went on murmuring " Fishency " and 
" System " at intervals for some time. 

They passed into a yard, and Mr. Shalford waved his hand to 
his three delivery vans all striped green and yellow — " uniform — 
green, yell'r — System." All over the premises were pinned absurd 
little cards. " This door locked after 7.30 — By order, Edwin Shal- 
ford," and the like. 

Mr. Shalford always wrote '' By order," though it conveyed no 
earthly meaning to him. He was one of those people who collect 
technicalities upon them as the Reduvius bug collects dirt. He was 
the sort of man who is not only ignorant, but absolutely incapable 
of English. When he wanted to say he had a six-penny-ha'penny 
longcloth to sell, he put it thus to startled customers: " Can DO you 
one, six half if y* like." He always omitted pronouns and articles 
and so forth; it seemed to him the very essence of the efficiently 
businesslike. His only preposition was " as " or the compound " as 
per." He abbreviated every word he could, he would have con- 
sidered himself the laughing-stock of Wood Street if he had chanced 
to spell socks in any way but " sox.'^ But, on the other hand, if he 
saved words here, he wasted them there: he never acknowledged 
an order that was not an esteemed favor, nor sent a pattern without 
begging to submit it. He never stipulated for so many months' 
credit, but bought in November " as Jan." It was not only words 
he abbreviated in his London communications. In paying his whole- 
salers his " System " admitted of a constant error in the discount 
of a penny or twopence, and it " facilitated business," he alleged, 
to ignore odd pence in the cheques he wrote. His ledger clerk was 
so struck with the beauty of this part of the System that he started 
a private one on his own account with the stamp box, that never 
came to Shal ford's knowledge. 

This admirable British merchant would glow with a particular 
pride of intellect when writing his London orders. 

" Ah! do y'r think you'll ever be able to write London orders? " 



76 THE WORKER AND HIS WORK 

he would say with honest pride to Kipps, waiting impatiently long 
after closing time to take these triumphs of commercial efficiency to 
post, and so end the interminable day. 

Kipps shook his head, anxious for Mr. Shalford to get on. 

" Now, here, f example, I've written — see? — ' 1 piece 1 in. cott. 
blk, elas. 1/ or.' What do I mean by that or, eh? — d'ye know? " 

Kipps promptly hadn't the faintest idea. 

*' And then, * 2 ea. silk net as per patts herewith '; ea.y eh? " 

*' Dunno, sir." 

It was not Mr. Shalford's way to explain things. *' Dear, dear! 
Pity you couldn't get some c'mercial education at your school. 
'Stid of all this lit'ry stuff. Well, my boy, if y' don't 'ussel a bit 
y'U never write London orders, that's pretty plain. Jest stick stamps 
on all those letters, and mind y'r stick 'em right way up, and try and 
profit a little more by the opportunities your aunt and uncle have 
provided ye. Can't say what'll happen t'ye if ye don't.'* 

And Kipps, tired, hungry, and belated, set about stamping with 
vigor and dispatch. 

*' Lick the envelope,' said Mr. Shalford, " lick the envelope" as 
though he grudged the youngster the postage-stamp gum. " It's the 
little things mount up," he would say; and, indeed, that was his 
philosophy of life — to bustle and save, always to bustle and save. 
His political creed linked Reform, which meant nothing, with 
Efficiency, which meant a sweated service, and Economy, which 
meant a sweated expenditure, and his conception of a satisfactory 
municipal life was to " keep down the rates." Even his religion was 
to save his soul, and to preach a similar cheese-paring to the world. 



THE ROMANCE OF A BUSY BROKER 
By O. Henry 

Pitcher, confidential clerk in the office of Harvey Maxwell, 
broker, allowed a look of mild interest and surprise to visit his usually 
expressionless countenance when his employer briskly entered at 
half-past nine in company with his young lady stenographer. With 
a snappy " Good-morning, Pitcher," Maxwell dashed at his desk 
as though he were intending to leap over it, and then plunged into 
the great heap of letters and telegrams waiting there for him. 

The young lady had been Maxwell's stenographer for a year. 
She was beautiful in a way that was decidedly imstenographic. She 
forewent the pomp of the alluring pompadour. She wore no chains, 
bracelets or lockets. She had not the air of being about to accept 
an invitation to luncheon. Her dress was grey and plain, but it 
fitted her figure with fidelity and discretion. In her neat black 
turban hat was the gold-green wing of a macaw. On this morning 
she was softly and shyly radiant. Her eyes were dreamily bright, 
her cheeks genuine peachblow, her expression a happy one, tinged 
with reminiscence. 

Pitcher, still mildly curious, noticed a difference in her ways this 
morning. Instead of going straight into the adjoining room, where 
her desk was, she lingered, slightly irresolute, in the outer office. 
Once she moved over by Maxwell's desk, near enough for him to be 
aware of her presence. 

The machine sitting at that desk was no longer a man; it was 
a busy New York broker, moved^ by buzzing wheels and un- 
coiling springs. 

" Well — what is it? Anything? " asked Maxwell sharply. His 
opened mail lay like a bank of stage snow on his crowded desk. His 
keen grey eye, impersonal and brusque, flashed upon her 
half impatiently. 

" Nothing," answered the stenographer, moving away with a 
little smile. 

" Mr. Pitcher," she said to the confidential clerk, " did Mr. Max- 
well say anything yesterday about engaging another stenographer? " 

77 



78 THE WORKER AND HIS WORK 

*' He did," answered Pitcher. '* He told me to get another one. 
I notified the agency yesterday afternoon to send over a few samples 
this morning. It's 9.45 o'clock, and not a single picture hat or piece 
of pineapple chewing-gum has showed up yet." 

" I will do the work as usual, then," said the young lady, " until 
some one comes to fill the place." And she went to her desk at once 
and hung the black turban hat with the gold-green macaw wing in 
its accustomed place. 

He who has been denied the spectacle of a busy Manhattan 
broker during a rush of business is handicapped for the profession of 
anthropology. The poet sings of the " crowded hour of glorious 
life." The broker's hour is not only crowded, but the minutes and 
seconds are hanging to all the straps and packing both front and 
rear platforms. 

And this day was Harvey Maxwell's busy day. The ticker began 
to reel out jerkily its fitful coils of tape, the desk telephone had a 
chronic attack of buzzing. Men began to throng into the office and 
call at him over the railing, jovially, sharply, viciously, excitedly. 
Messenger boys ran in and out with messages and telegrams. The 
clerks in the office jumped about like sailors during a storm. Even 
Pitcher's face relaxed into something resembling animation. 

On the Exchange there were hurricanes and landslides and snow- 
storms and glaciers and volcanoes, and those elemental disturbances 
were reproduced in miniature in the brokers' offices. Maxwell shoved 
his chair against the wall and transacted business after the manner 
of a toe dancer. He jumped from ticker to 'phone, from desk to door, 
with the trained agility of a harlequin. 

In the midst of this growing and important stress the broker 
became suddenly aware of a high-rolled fringe of golden hair under 
a nodding canopy of velvet and ostrich tips, an imitation sealskin 
sacque, and a string of beads as large as hickory nuts, ending near 
the floor with a silver heart. There was a self-possessed young 
lady connected with these accessories; and Pitcher was there to 
construe her. 

" Lady from the Stenographer's Agency to see about the posi- 
tion," said Pitcher. 

Maxwell turned half around, with his hands full of papers and 
ticker tape. 

" What position? " he asked, with a fmwn. 



THE ROMANCE OF A BUSY BROKER 79 

" Position of stenographer," said Pitcher. " You told me yes- 
terday to call them up and have one sent over this morning." 

" You are losing your mind, Pitcher," said Maxwell. " WTiy 
should I have given you any such instructions? Miss Leslie has 
given perfect satisfaction during the year she has been here. The 
place is hers as long as she chooses to retain it. There's no place 
open here, madam. Countermand that order with the agency, 
Pitcher, and don't bring any more of 'em in here." 

The silver heart left the office, swinging and banging itself inde- 
pendently against the office furniture as it indignantly departed. 
Pitcher seized a moment to remark to the bookkeeper that the " old 
man " seemed to get more absent-minded and forgetful every 
day of the world. 

The rush and pace of business grew fiercer and faster. On the 
floor they were pounding half a dozen stocks in which Maxwell's 
customers were heavy investors. Orders to buy and sell were coming 
and going as swift as the flight of swallows. Some of his own hold- 
ings were imperilled, and the man was working like some high-geared, 
delicate, strong machine — strung to full tension, going at full speed, 
accurate, never hesitating, with the proper word and decision and 
act ready and prompt as clockwork. Stocks and bonds, loans and 
mortgages, margins and securities — here was a world of finance, and 
there was no room in it for the human world or the world of nature. 

When the luncheon hour drew near there came a slight lull in 
the uproar. 

Maxwell stood by his desk with his hands full of telegrams and 
memoranda, with a fountain pen over his right ear and his hair 
hanging in disorderly strings over his forehead. His window was 
open, for the beloved janitress Spring had turned on a little warmth 
through the waking registers of the earth. 

And through the window came a wandering — perhaps a lost — 
odor — a delicate, sweet odor of lilac that fixed the broker for a 
moment immovable. For this odor belonged to Miss Leslie ; it was her 
own, and hers only. 

The odor brought her vividly, almost tangibly, before him. 
The world of finance dwindled suddenly to a speck. And she was 
in the next room — twenty steps away. 

" By George, I'll do it now," said Maxwell, half aloud. " I'll 
ask her now. I wonder I didn't do it long ago." 



80 THE WORKER AND HIS WORK 

He dashed into the inner office with the haste of a short trying 
to cover. He charged upon the desk of the stenographer. 

She looked up at him with a smile. A soft pink crept over her 
cheek, and her eyes were kind and frank. Maxwell leaned one elbow 
on her desk. He still clutched fluttering papers with both hands 
and the pen was above his ear. 

" Miss Leslie," he began hurriedly, " I have but a moment to 
spare. I want to say something in that moment. Will you be my 
wife? I haven't had time to make love to you in the ordinary way, 
but I really do love you. Talk quick, please — those fellows are 
clubbing the stuffing out of Union Pacific." 

" Oh, what are you talking about? " exclaimed the young lady. 
She rose to her feet and gazed upon him, round-eyed. 

" Don't you understand? " said Maxwell, restively. " I want 
you to marry me. I love you, Miss Leslie. I wanted to tell you, and 
I snatched a minute when things had slackened up a bit. They're 
calling me for the 'phone now. Tell 'em to wait a minute, Pitcher. 
Won't you, Miss Leslie? " 

The stenographer acted very queerly. At first she seemed over- 
come with amazement; then tears flowed from her wondering eyes; 
and then she smiled sunnily through them, and one of her arms slid 
tenderly about the broker's neck. 

" I know now," she said, softly. " It's this old business that has 
driven everything else out of your head for the time. I was fright- 
ened at first. Don't you remember, Harvey? We were married last 
evening at 8 o'clock in the Little Church Around the Corner." 



THE WOMAN AND HER BONDS 
By Edwin Lefevre 

It seemed to FuUerton F. Colwell, of the famous Stock-Exchange 
house of Wilson & Graves, that he had done his full duty by his 
friend Harry Hunt. He was a director in a half-score of companies 
— financial debutantes which his firm had " brought out " and over 
whose stock-market destinies he presided. His partners left a great 
deal to him, and even the clerks in the office ungrudgingly acknowl- 
edged that Mr. Colwell was " the hardest-worked man in the place, 
barring none " — an admission that means much to those who know 
it is always the downtrodden clerks who do all the work and their 
employers who take all the profit and credit. Possibly the important 
young men who did all the work in Wilson & Graves' office bore 
witness to Mr. Colwell's industry so cheerfully, because Mr. Colwell 
was ever inquiring, very courteously, and, above all, sympathetically, 
into the amount of work each man had to perform, and suggesting, 
the next moment, that the laborious amount in question was indis- 
putably excessive. Also, it was he who raised salaries; wherefore he 
was the most charming as well as the busiest man there. Of his 
partners, John G. Wilson was a consumptive, forever going from one 
health resort to another, devoting his millions to the purchase of 
railroad tickets in the hope of out-racing Death. George B. Graves 
was a dyspeptic, nervous, irritable, and, to boot, penurious; a man 
whose chief recommendation at the time Wilson formed the firm had 
been his cheerful willingness to do all the dirty work. Frederick R. 
Denton was busy in the " Board Room " — the Stock Exchange — all 
day, executing orders, keeping watch over the market behavior of 
the stocks with which the firm was identified, and from time to time 
hearing things not meant for his ears, being the truth regarding 
Wilson & Graves. But Fullerton F. Colwell had to do everything 
— in the stock market and in the office. He conducted the manipu- 
lation of the Wilson & Graves stocks, took charge of the unnefarious 
part of the numerous pools formed by the firm's customers — Mr. 
Graves attending to the other details — and had a hand in the actual 
management of various corporations. Also, he conferred with a 

By permission, from Wall Street Stories, by Edwin Lefevre. Copyright, 
1900, 1901, by Harper & Bros. 

6 81 



82 THE WORKER AND HIS WORK 

dozen people daily — chiefly " big people," in Wall Street parlance — 
who were about to " put through " stock-market " deals." He had 
devoted his time, which was worth thousands, and his brain, which 
was worth millions, to disentangling his careless friend's affairs, and 
when it was all over and every claim adjusted, and he had refused 
the executor's fees to which he was entitled, it was found that poor 
Harry Hunt's estate not only was free from debt, but consisted of 
$38,000 in cash, deposited in the Trolleyman's Trust Company, sub- 
ject to Mrs. Hunt's order, and drawing interest at the rate of 2^ 
per cent, per annum. He had done his work wonderfully well, and, 
in addition to the cash, the widow owned an unencumbered house 
Harry had given her in his lifetime. 

Not long after the settlement of the estate Mrs. Hunt called at 
his office. It was a very busy day. The bears were misbehaving — 
and misbehaving mighty successfully. Alabama Coal & Iron — the 
firm's great specialty— was under heavy fire from " Sam " Sharpe's 
Long Tom as well as from the room-traders' Maxims. All that Col- 
well could do was to instruct Denton, who was on the ground, to 
'' support " Ala. C. & I. sufficiently to discourage the enemy, and not 
enough to acquire the company's entire capital stock. He was him- 
self at that moment practising that peculiar form of financial dis- 
simulation which amoimts to singing blithely at the top of your voice 
when your beloved sackful of gold has been ripped by bearpaws 
and the coins are pouring out through the rent. Every quotation 
was of importance; a half-inch of tape might contain an epic of 
disaster. It was not wise to fail to read every printed character. 

" Good morning, Mr. Colwell." 

He ceased to pass the tape through his fingers, and turned 
quickly, almost apprehensively, for a woman's voice was not heard 
with pleasure at an hour of the day when distractions were undesirable, 

" Ah! good morning, Mrs. Hunt," he said, very politely. " I am 
very glad indeed to see you. And how do you do? '^ He shook hands, 
and led her, a bit ceremoniously, to a huge arm-chair. His manners 
endeared him even to the big Wall Street operators, who were 
chiefly interested in the terse speech of the ticker. 

" Of course, you are very well, Mrs. Hunt. Don't tell me 
you are not." 

" Ye-es," hesitatingly. " As well as I can hope to be since 
— since " 



THE WOMAN AND HER BONDS 83 

" Time alone, dear Mrs. Hunt, can help us. You must be very- 
brave. It is what he would have liked." 

" Yes, I know," she sighed. " I suppose I must." 

There was a silence. He stood by, deferentially sympathetic. 

" Ticky-ticky-ticky-tick," said the ticker. 

What did it mean, in figures? Reduced to dollars and cents, what 
did the last three brassy taps say? Perhaps the bears were storming 
the Alabama Coal & Iron intrenchments of ^^ scaled buying orders "; 
perhaps Colwell's trusted lieutenant, Fred Denton, had repulsed the 
enemy. Who was winning? A spasm, as of pain, passed over Mr. 
Fullerton F. Colwell's grave face. But the next moment he said to 
her, slightly conscience-strickenly, as if he reproached himself for 
thinking of the stock market in her presence: " You must not permit 
j^ourself to brood, Mrs. Hunt. You know what I thought of Harry, 
and I need not tell you how glad I shall be to do what I may, for his 
sake, Mrs. Hunt, and for your own." 

" Ticky-ticky-ticky-tick ! " repeated the ticker. 

To avoid listening to the voluble little machine, he went on: 
" Believe me, Mrs. Hunt, I shall be only too glad to serve you." 

" You are so kind, Mr. Colwell," murmured the widow; and 
after a pause: " I came to see you about that money." 

" Yes? " 

" They tell me in the trust company that if I leave the money 
there without touching it I'll make $79 a month.'^ 

" Let me see; yes; that is about what you may expect." 

" Well, Mr. Colwell, I can't live on that. Willie's school costs 
me $50, and then there's Edith's clothes,'^ she went on, with an air 
which implied that as for herself she wouldn't care at all. " You see, 
he was so indulgent, and they are used to so much. Of course, it's 
a blessing we have the house; but taxes take up so much; and — 
isn't there some way of investing the money so it could 
bring more? " 

" I might buy some bonds for you. But for your principal to be 
absolutely safe at all times, you will have to invest in very high- 
grade securities, which will return to you about 3>^ per cent. That 
would mean, let's see, $110 a month." 

" And Harry spent $10,000 a year," she murmured complainingly. 

" Harry was always — er — rather extravagant." 

" Well, I'm glad he enjoyed himself while he lived," she said, 



84 THE WORKER AND HIS WORK 

quickly. Then, after a pause: " And, Mr. Colwell, if I should get 
tired of the bonds, could I always get my money back? " 

" You could always find a ready market for them. You might 
sell them for a little more or for a little less than you paid." 

" I shouldn't like to sell them," she said, with a business air, 
" for less than I paid. What would be the sense? " 

" You are right, Mrs. Hunt," he said, encouragingly. " It 
wouldn't be very profitable, would it? " 

" Tkky-ticky-ticky-ticky-ticky-ticky-tick! " said the ticker. It 
was whirring away at a furious rate. Its story is always interesting 
when it is busy. And Colwell had not looked at the tape in fully 
five minutes! 

" Couldn't you buy something for me, Mr. Colwell, that when I 
came to sell it I could get more than it cost me? " 

" No man can guarantee that, Mrs. Hunt." 

" I shouldn't like to lose the little I have," she said, hastily. 

" Oh, there is no danger of that. If you will give me a check 
for $35,000, leaving $3000 with the trust company for emergencies, 
I shall buy some bonds which I feel reasonably certain will advance 
in price within a few months." 

" Ticky-ticky-ticky-tick" interrupted the ticker. In some inex- 
plicable way it seemed to him that the brassy sound had an ominous 
ring, so he added: " But you will have to let me know promptly, 
Mrs. Hunt. The stock market, you see, is not a polite institution. 
It waits for none, not even for your sex.'* 

" Gracious me, must I take the money out of the bank to-day 
and bring it to you? " 

" A check will do." He began to drum on the desk nervously 
with his fingers, but ceased abruptly as he became aware of it. 

" Very well, I'll send it to you to-day. I know you're very busy, 
so I won't keep you any longer. And you'll buy good, cheap 
bonds for me? " 

" Yes, Mrs. Hunt." 

" There's no danger of losing, is there, Mr. Colwell? " 

" None whatever. I have bought some for Mrs. Colwell, and I 
would not run the slightest risk. You need have no fear about them." 

" It's exceedingly kind of you, Mr. Colwell. I am more grateful 
than I can say. I — I " 

*' The way to please me is not to mention it, Mrs. Hunt. I am 



THE WOMAN AND HER BONDS 85 

going to try to make some money for you, so that you can at least 
double the income from the trust company." 

" Thanks, ever so much. Of course, I know you are thoroughly 
familiar with such things. But I've heard so much about the money 
everybody loses in Wall Street that I was half afraid." 

'' Not when you buy good bonds, Mrs. Hunt." 

" Good morning, Mr. Col well," 

" Good morning, Mrs. Hunt. Remember, whenever I may be of 
service you are to let me know immediately." 

" Oh, thank you so much, Mr. Colwell. Good morning." 

" Good morning, Mrs. Hunt." 

Mrs. Hunt sent him a check for $35,000, and Colwell bought 100 
five-per-cent. gold bonds of the Manhattan Electric Light, Heat & 
Power Company, paying 96 for them. 

" These bonds," he wrote to her, " will surely advance in price, 
and when they touch a good figure I shall sell a part, and keep the 
balance for you as an investment. The operation is partly specu- 
lative, but I assure you the money is safe. You will have an oppor- 
tunity to increase your original capital and your entire funds will 
then be invested in these same bonds — Manhattan Electric 5s — 
as many as the money will buy. I hope within six months to secure 
for you an income of twice as much as you have been receiving from 
the trust company." 

The next morning she called at his office. 

" Good morning, Mrs. Hunt. I trust you are well." 

*' Good morning, Mr. Colwell. I know I am an awful bother 
to you, but " 

" You are greatly mistaken, Mrs. Hunt." 

" You are very kind. You see, I don't exactly understand about 
those bonds. I thought you could tell me. I'm so stupid," archly. 

" I won't have you prevaricate about yourself, Mrs. Hunt. Now, 
you gave me $35,000, didn't you? " 

" Yes." Her tone indicated that she granted that much and 
nothing more. 

" Well, I opened an account for you with our firm. You were 
credited with the amount. I then gave an order to buy one himdred 
bonds of $1000 each. We paid 96 for them." 

" I don't follow you quite, Mr. Colwell. I told you " — another 
arch smile — " I was so stupid I " 



86 THE WORKER AND HIS WORK 

" It means that for each $1000-bond $960 was paid. It brought 
the total up to $96,000." 

" But I only had $35,000 to begin with. You don't mean I've 
made that much, do you? " 

"Not yet, Mrs. Hunt. You put in $35,000; that was your 
margin, you know; and we put in the other $61,000 and kept 
the bonds as security. We owe you $35,000, and you owe us 
$61,000, and " 

" But — I know you'll laugh at me, Mr. Colwell — but I really 
can't help thinking it's something like the poor people you read about, 
who mortgage their houses, and they go on, and the first thing you 
know some real-estate agent owns the house and you have nothing. 
I have a friend, Mrs. Stillwell, who lost hers that way," she fin- 
ished, corroboratively. 

" This is not a similar case, exactly. The reason why you use 
a margin is that you can do much more with the money that way 
than if you bought outright. It protects your broker against a depre- 
ciation in the security purchased, which is all he wants. In this case 
you theoretically owe us $61,000, but the bonds are in your name, 
and they are worth $96,000, so that if you want to pay us back, 
all you have to do is to order us to sell the bonds, return the money 
we have advanced, and keep the balance of your margin; that is, 
of your original sum." 

" I don't understand why I should owe the firm. I shouldn't 
mind so much owing you, because I know you'd never take advantage 
of my ignorance of business matters. But I've never met Mr. Wilson 
nor Mr. Graves. I don't even know how they look." 

" But you know me," said Mr. Colwell, with patient courtesy. 

" Oh, it isn't that I'm afraid of being cheated, Mr. Colwell," she 
said hastily and reassuringly; " but I don't wish to be under obliga- 
tions to any one, particularly utter strangers; though, of course, if 
you say it is all right, I am satisfied." 

" My dear Mrs. Hunt, don't worry about this matter. We 
bought these bonds at 96. If the price should advance to 110, as I 
think it will, then you can sell three-fifths for $66,000, pay us back 
$61,000, and keep $5000 for emergencies in savings banks drawing 
4 per cent, interest, and have in addition 40 bonds which will pay 
you $2000 a year." 

" That would be lovely. And the bonds are now 96? " 



THE WOMAN AND HER BONDS 87 

" Yes; you will always find the price in the financial page of the 
newspapers, where it says BONDS. Look for Man. Elec. ^s," and 
he showed her. 

" Oh, thanks, ever so much. Of course, I am a great bother, 
I know " 

" You are nothing of the kind, Mrs. Hunt. I'm only too glad to 
be of the slightest use to you." 

Mr. Colwell, busy with several important deals, did not follow 
closely the fluctuations in the price of Manhattan Electric Light, 
Heat & Power Company 5s. The fact that there had been any 
change at all was made clear to him by Mrs. Hunt. She called a 
few days after her first visit, with perturbation written large on her 
face. Also, she wore the semi-resolute look of a person who expects 
to hear unacceptable excuses. 

" Good morning, Mr. Colwell." 

" How do you do, Mrs. Hunt? Well, I hope." 

" Oh, I am well enough. I wish I could say as much for my 
financial matters." She had acquired the phrase from the financial 
reports which she had taken to reading religiously every day. 

" Why, how is that? " 

" They are 95 now," she said, a trifle accusingly. 

" Who are they, pray, Mrs. Hunt?." in surprise. 

" The bonds. I saw it in last night's paper." 

Mr. Colwell smiled. Mrs. Hunt almost became indignant at 
his levity. 

" Don't let that worry you, Mrs. Hunt. The bonds are all right. 
The market is a trifle dull; that's all." 

" A friend," she said, very slowly, " who knows all about Wall 
Street, told me last night that it made a difference of $1000 to me." 

" So it does, in a way; that is, if you tried to sell your bonds. 
But as you are not going to do so until they show you a handsome 
profit, you need not worry. Don't be concerned about the matter, 
I beg of you. When the time comes for you to sell the bonds I'll let 
you know. Never mind if the price goes off a point or two. You 
are amply protected. Even if there should be a panic I'll see tliat 
you are not sold out, no matter how low the price goes. You are not 
to worry about it; in fact, you are not to think about it at all." 

" Oh, thanks, ever so much, Mr. Colwell. I didn't sleep a wink 
last night. But I knew " 



SS THE WORKER AND HIS WORK 

A clerk came in with some stock certificates and stopped short. 
He wanted Mr. Col well's signature in a hurry, and at the same time 
dared not interrupt. Mrs. Hunt thereupon rose and said: " Well, I 
won't take up any more of your time. Good morning, Mr. Golwell. 
Thanks ever so much.'* 

" Don't mention it, Mrs. (Hunt. Good morning. You are 
going to do very well with those bonds if you only have patience." 

" Oh, I'll be patient now that I know all about it; yes, indeed. 
And I hope your prophecy will be fulfilled. Good morning, 
Mr. Colwell." 

Little by little the bonds continued to decline. The syndicate in 
charge was not ready to move them. But Mrs. Hunt's unnamed 
friend — her Cousin Emily's husband — ^who was employed in an up- 
town bank, did not know all the particulars of that deal. He knew 
the Street in the abstract, and had accordingly implanted the seed 
of insomnia in her quaking soul. Then, as he saw values decline, 
he did his best to make the seed grow, fertilizing a naturally rich 
soil with ominous hints and head-shakings and with phrases that 
made her firmly believe he was gradually and considerately pre- 
paring her for the worst. On the third day of her agony Mrs, Hunt 
walked into Col well's office. Her face was pale and she looked dis- 
tressed. Mr. Colwell sighed involuntarily — a scarcely perceptible 
and not very impolite sigh — and said: " Good morning Mrs. Hunt." 

She nodded gravely and, with a little gasp, said, tremulously: 
" The bonds! " 

" Yes? What about them? '* 

She gasped again, and said: " The p-p-papers! " 

" What do you mean, Mrs. Hunt? " 

She dropped into a chair nervously, as if exhausted. After a 
pause she said: " It's in all the papers. I thought the Herald might 
be mistaken, so I bought the Tribune and the Times and the Sun. 
But no. It was the same in all. It was," she added tragically, " 93 \ " 

" Yes? " he said, smilingly. 

The smile did not reassure her; it irritated her and aroused her 
suspicions. By him, of all men, should her insomnia be deemed no 
laughing matter. 

" Doesn't that mean a loss of $3000? " she asked. There was a 
deny-it-if-you-dare inflection in her voice of which she was not con- 
scious. Her cousin's husband had been a careful gardener. 



THE WOMAN AND HER BONDS 89 

" No, because you are not going to sell your bonds at 93, but at 
1 10, or thereabouts." 

" But if I did want to sell the bonds now, wouldn't I lose $3000? " 
she queried, challengingly. Then she hastened to answer herself: 
" Of course I would, Mr. Colwell. Even I can tell that." 

" You certainly would, Mrs. Hunt; but " 

" I knew I was right," with irrepressible triumph. 

" But you are not going to sell the bonds." 

" Of course, I don't want to, because I can't afford to lose any 
money, much less $3000. But I don't see how I can help losing it. 
I was warned from the first," she said, as if that made it worse. ^' I 
certainly had no business to risk my all." She had waived the right 
to blame some one else, and there was something consciously just 
and judicial about her attitude that was eloquent. Mr. Colwell 
was moved by it. 

" You can have your money back, Mrs. Hunt, if you wish it," 
he told her, quite unprofessionally. " You seem to worry about it 
so much." 

" Oh, I am not worrying, exactly; only, I do wish I hadn't 
bought — I mean, the money was so safe in the Trolley man's Trust 
Company, that I can't help thinking I might just as well have let it 
stay where it was, even if it didn't bring me in so much. But, of 
course, if you want me to leave it here," she said, very slowly to 
give him every opportunity to contradict her, " of course, I'll do 
just as you say." 

" My dear Mrs. Hunt," Colwell said, very politely, " my only 
desire is to please you and to help you. When you buy bonds you 
must be prepared to be patient. It may take months before you 
will be able to sell yours at a profit, and I don't know how low the 
price will go in the meantime. Nobody can tell you that, because 
nobody knows. But it need make no difference to you whether the 
bonds go to 90, or even to 85, which is unlikely." 

"Why, how can you say so, Mr. Colwell? If the bonds go to 
90, I'll lose $6000 — my friend said it was one thousand for every 
number down. And at 85 that would be " — counting on her fingers 
— " eleven numbers, that is, eleven — thousand — dollars! " And she 
gazed at him, awe-strickenly, reproachfully. " How can you say it 
would make no difference, Mr. Colwell? " 

Mr. Colwell fiercely hated the unnamed " friend," who had told 



90 THE WORKER AND HIS WORK 

her so little and yet so much. But he said to her, mildly: " I thought 
that I had explained all that to you. It might hurt a weak specu- 
lator if the bonds declined ten points, though such a decline is utterly 
improbable. But it won't affect you in the slightest, since, having 
an ample margin, you would not be forced to sell. You would simply 
hold on until the price rose again. Let me illustrate. Supposing 
your house cost $10,000, and " 

" Harry paid $32,000," she said, correctingly. On second 
thought she smiled, in order to let him see that she knew her interpo- 
lation was irrelevant. But he might as well know the actual cost. 

" Very well," he said, good-humoredly, " we'll say $32,000, which 
was also the price of every other house in that block. And suppose 
that, owing to some accident, or for any reason whatever, nobody 
could be found to pay more than $25,000 for one of the houses, and 
three or four of your neighbors sold theirs at that price. But you 
wouldn't because you knew that in the fall, when everybody came 
back to town, you would find plenty of people who'd give you $50,000 
for your house; you wouldn't sell it for $25,000, and you wouldn't 
worry. Would you, now? " he finished, cheerfully. 

" No," she said slowly. " I wouldn't worry. But," hesitatingly, 
for, after all, she felt the awkwardness of her position, *' I wish I had 
the money instead of the bonds." And she added, self-defensively: 
'' I haven't slept a wink for three nights thinking about this." 

The thought of his coming emancipation cheered Mr. Colwell 
immensely. " Your wish shall be gratified, Mrs. Hunt. Why didn't 
you ask me before, if you felt that way? " he said, in mild reproach. 
And he summoned a clerk. 

" Make out a check for $35,000 payable to Mrs. Rose Hunt, and 
transfer the 100 Manhattan Electric Light 5s to my personal account." 

He gave her the check and told her: " Here is the money. I am 
very sorry that I unwittingly caused you some anxiety. But all's 
well that ends well. Any time that I can be of service to you — Not at 
all. Don't thank me, please; no. Good morning." 

But he did not tell her that by taking over her account he paid 
$96,000 for bonds he could have bought in the open market for 
$93,000. He was the politest man in Wall Street; and, after all, 
he had known Hunt for many years. 

A week later Manhattan Electric 5-per-cent. bonds sold at 96 
again. Mrs. Hunt called on him. It was noon, and she evidently 



THE WOMAN AND HER BONDS 91 

had spent the morning mustering up courage for the visit. They 
greeted one another, she embarrassed and he courteous and kindly 
as usual. 

" Mr. Colwell, you still have those bonds, haven't you? " 

" Why, yes." 

" I— I think I'd like to take them back." 

" Certainly, Mrs. Hunt. I'll find out how mucTi they are selling 
for." He summoned a clerk to get a quotation on Manhattan 
Electric Ss. The clerk telephoned to one of their bond-specialists, 
and learned that the bonds could be bought at 96^. He reported to 
Mr. Colwell, and Mr. Colwell told Mrs. Hunt, adding: " So you see 
they are practically where they were when you bought them before." 

She hesitated. "I — I — didn't you buy them from me at 93? 
I'd like to buy them back at the same price I sold them to you." 

"No, Mrs. Hunt," he said; "I bought them from you at 96." 

"But the price was 93." And she added, corroboratively: " Don't 
you remember it was in all the papers? " 

" Yes, but I gave yoy back exactly the same amount that I 
received from you, and I had the bonds transferred to my account. 
They stand on our books as having cost me 96." 

" But couldn't you let me have them at 93? " she persisted. 

" I'm very sorry, Mrs. Hunt, but I don't see how I could. If 
you buy them in the open market now, you will be in exactly the 
same position as before you sold them, and you will make a great 
deal of money, because they are going up now. Let me buy them for 
you at 96>^." 

" At 93, you mean," with a tentative smile. 

" At whatever price they may be selling for," he corrected, 
patiently. 

" Why did you let me sell them, Mr. Colwell? " she asked 
plaintively. 

" But, my dear madam, if you buy them now, you will be no 
worse off than if you had kept the original lot." 

" Well, I don't see why it is that I have to pay 96^ now for the 
very same bonds I sold last Tuesday at 93. If it was some other 
bonds," she added, " I wouldn't mind so much." 

" My dear Mrs. Hunt, it makes no difference which bonds you 
hold. They have all risen in price, yours and mine and everybody's; 
your lot was the same as any other lot. You see that, don't you? " 



92 THE WORKER AND HIS WORK 
"Ye-es; but " 



" Well, then, you are exactly where you were before you bought 
any. You've lost nothing, because you received your money 
back intact." 

" I'm willing to buy them," she said resolutely, " at 93." 

" Mrs. Hunt, I wish I could buy them for you at that price. 
But there are none for sale cheaper than 96^." 

" Oh, why did I let you sell my bonds! " she said disconsolately. 

" Well, you worried so much because they had declined that " 

" Yes, but I didn't know anything about business matters. You 
know I didn't, Mr. Colwell," she finished, accusingly. 

He smiled in his good-natured way. " Shall I buy the bonds for 
you? " he asked. He knew the plans of the syndicate in charge, and 
being sure the bonds would advance, he thought she might as well 
share in the profits. At heart he felt sorry for her. 

She smiled back. " Yes," she told him, " at 93." It did not seem 
right to her, notwithstanding his explanations, that she should pay 
96>4 for them, when the price a few days ago was 93. 

" But how can I, if they are 96>^ ? " 

" Mr. Colwell, it is 93 or nothing." She was almost pale at her 
own boldness. It really seemed to her as if the price had only been 
waiting for her to sell out in order to advance. And though she 
wanted the bonds, she did not feel like yielding. 

" Then I very much fear it will have to be nothing." 

" Er — good morning, Mr. Colwell," on the verge of tears. 

" Good morning, Mrs. Hunt." And before he knew it, forgetting 
all that had gone before, he added: " Should you change your mind, 
I should be glad to " 

" I know I wouldn't pay more than 93 if I lived to be a thousand 
years." She looked expectantly at him, to see if he had repented, 
and she smiled — the smile that is a woman's last resort, that says, 
almost articulately: " I know you will, of course, do as I ask. My 
question is only a formality. I know your nobility, and I fear not." 
But he only bowed her out, very politely. 

On the Stock Exchange the price of Man. Elec. L. H. & P. Co. $s 
rose steadily. Mrs. Hunt, too indignant to feel lachrymose, discussed 
the subject with her Cousin Emily and her husband. Emily was very 
much interested. Between her and Mrs. Hunt they forced the poor 
man to make strange admissions, and, deliberately ignoring his feeble 



THE WOMAN AND HER BONDS 93 

protests, they worked themselves up to the point of believing that, 
while it would be merely generous of Mr. Colwell to let his friend's 
widow have the bonds at 93, it would be only his obvious duty to 
let her have them at 96^. The moment they reached this decision 
Mrs. Hunt knew how to act. And the more she thought the more 
indignant she became. The next morning she called on her late 
husband's executor and friend. 

Her face wore the look often seen on those ardent souls who 
think their sacred and inalienable rights have been trampled upon 
by the tyrant Man, but who at the same time feel certain the hour 
of retribution is near. 

" Good morning, Mr. Colwell. I came to find out exactly what 
you propose to do about my bonds." Her voice conveyed the im- 
pression that she expected violent opposition, perhaps even bad 
language, from him. 

" Good morning, Mrs. Hunt. Why, what do you mean? " 

His affected ignorance deepened the lines on her face. Instead of 
bluster he was using finesse! 

" I think you ought to know, Mr. Colwell," she said, meaningly. 

" Well, I really don't. I remember you wouldn't heed my advice 
when I told you not to sell out, and again when I advised you to 
buy them back." 

" Yes, at 96J^," she burst out, indignantly. 

" Well, if you had, you would to-day have a profit of over $7000." 

" And whose fault is it that I haven't? " She paused for a reply. 
Receiving none, she went on: '' But never mind; I have decided to 
accept your offer," very bitterly, as if a poor widow could not afford 
to be a chooser; " I'll take those bonds at 96^." And she added, 
under her breath: " Although it really ought to be 93. " 

" But, Mrs. Hunt," said Colwell, in measureless astonishment, 
" you can't do that, you know. You wouldn't buy them when I 
wanted you to, and I can't buy them for you now at 96^. Really, 
you ought to see that." 

Cousin Emily and she had gone over a dozen imaginary inter- 
views with Mr. Colwell — of varying degrees of storminess — the night 
before, and they had, in an idle moment, and not because they really 
expected it, represented Mr. Colwell as taking that identical stand. 
Mrs. Hunt was, accordingly, prepared to show both that she knew 
her moral and technical rights, and that she was ready to resist any 



94 THE WORKER AND HIS WORK 

attempt to ignore them. So she said, in a voice so ferociously calm 
that it should have warned any guilty man: " Mr. Colwell, will you 
answer me one question? " 

" A thousand, Mrs. Hunt, with pleasure." 

"No; only one. Have you kept the bonds that I bought, or have 
you not? " 

" What difference does that make, Mrs. Hunt? " 

He evaded the answer! 

" Yes or no, please. Have you, or have you not, those same 
identical bonds? " 

" Yes; I have. But " 

" And to whom do those bonds belong, by rights? " She was 
still pale, but resolute. 

" To me, certainly." 

" To you J Mr. Colwell? " She smiled. And in her smile were 
a thousand feelings; but not mirth. 

" Yes, Mrs. Hunt, to me." 

" And do you propose to keep them? " 

" I certainly do." 

" Not even if I pay 96 J^ will you give them to me? " 

" Mrs. Hunt," Colwell said with warmth, " when I took those 
bonds off your hands at 93 it represented a loss on paper of $3000 — " 

She smiled in pity — ^pity for his judgment in thinking her so 
hopelessly stupid. 

" And when you wanted me to sell them back to you at 93 after 
they had risen to 96^, if I had done as you wished, it would have 
meant an actual loss of $3000 to me." 

Again she smiled — the same smile, only the pity was now mingled 
with rising indignation. 

" For Harry's sake I was willing to pocket the first loss, in order 
that you might not worry. But I didn't see why I should make 
you a present of $3000," he said, very quietly. 

" I never asked you to do it," she retorted, hotly. 

" If you had lost any money through my fault, it would have 
been different. But you had your original capital unimpaired. You 
had nothing to lose, if you bought back the same bonds at practically 
the same price. Now you come and ask me to sell you the bonds 
at 96>^ that are selling in the market for 104, as a reward, I suppose, 
for your refusal tq take my advice." 



THE WOMAN AND HER BONDS 95 

" Mr. Colwell, you take advantage of my position to insult me. 
And Harry trusted you so much! But let me tell you that I am not 
going to let you do just as you please. No doubt you would like to 
have me go home and forget how youVe acted toward me. But I am 
going to consult a lawyer, and see if I am to be treated this way by 
a friend of my husband's. YouVe made a mistake, Mr. Colwell." 

" Yes, madam, I certainly have. And, in order to avoid making 
any more, you will oblige me greatly by never again calling at this 
office. By all means consult a lawyer. Good morning, madam," said 
the politest man in Wall Street. 

" We'll see," was all she said; and she left the room. 

Colwell paced up and down his office nervously. It was seldom 
that he allowed himself to lose his temper and he did not like it. 
The ticker whirred away excitedly, and in an absent-minded, half- 
disgusted way he glanced sideways at it. 

" Man. Elec, ss, 106 J^," he read on the tape. 



THE WHEAT PIT 
By Frank Norris 

The Board of Trade was a vast enclosure, lighted on either side 
by great windows of colored glass, the roof supported by thin iron pil- 
lars elaborately decorated. To the left were the bulletin blackboards, 
and beyond these, in the northwest angle of the floor, a great railed-in 
space where the Western Union Telegraph was installed. To the 
right, on the other side of the room, a row of tables, laden with 
neatly arranged paper bags half full of samples of grains, stretched 
along the east wall from the doorway of the public room at one end 
to the telephone room at the other. 

The center of the floor was occupied by the pits. To the left and 
to the front of Landry the provision pit, to the right the corn pit, 
while further on at the north extremity of the floor, and nearly under 
the visitors' gallery, much larger than the other two, and flanked 
by the wicket of the official recorder, was the wheat pit itself. 

Directly opposite the visitors' gallery, high upon the south wall 
a great dial was affixed, and on the dial a marking hand that indi- 
cated the current price of wheat, fluctuating with the changes made 
in the Pit. Just now it stood at ninety-three and three-eighths, the 
closing quotation of the preceding day. 

As yet all the pits were empty. It was some fifteen minutes after 
nine. Landry checked his hat and coat at the coat-room near the 
north entrance, and slipped into an old tennis jacket of striped blue 
flannel. Then, hatless, his hands in his pockets, he leisurely crossed 
the floor, and sat down in one of the chairs that were ranged in files 
upon the floor in front of the telegraph enclosure. He scrutinized 
again the dispatches and orders that he held in his hands; then, having 
fixed them in his memory, tore them into very small bits, looking 
vaguely about the room, developing his plan of campaign for 
the morning. 

In a sense Landry Court had a double personality. Away from 
the neighborhood and influence of La Salle Street, he was " rattle- 
brained," absent-minded, impractical, and easily excited, the last 
96 



THE WHEAT PIT 97 

fellow in the world to be trusted with any business responsibility. 
But the thunder of the streets around the Board of Trade, and, above 
all, the movement and atmosphere of the floor itself awoke within 
him a very different Landry Court; a whole new set of nerves came 
into being with the tap of the nine-thirty gong, a whole new system of 
brain machinery began to move with the first figures called in the Pit. 
And from that instant until the close of the session, no floor trader, 
no broker's clerk nor scalper was more alert, more shrewd, or kept 
his head more surely than the same young fellow who confused his 
social engagements for the evening of the same day. The Landry 
Court the Dearborn girls knew was a far different young man from 
him who now leaned his elbows on the arms of the chair upon the 
floor of the Board, and, his eyes narrowing, his lips tightening, began 
to speculate upon what was to be the temper of the Pit that morning. 

Meanwhile the floor was beginning to fill up. Over in the railed-in 
space, where the hundreds of telegraph instruments were in place, 
the operators were arriving in twos and threes. They hung their hats 
and ulsters upon the pegs in the wall back of them, and in linen 
coats, or in their shirt-sleeves, went to their seats, or, sitting upon 
their tables, called back and forth to each other, joshing, cracking 
jokes. Some few addressed themselves directly to work, and here 
and there the intermittent clicking of a key began, like a diligent 
cricket busking himself in advance of its mates. 

From the corridors on the ground floor up through the south 
doors came the pit traders in increasing groups. The noise of foot- 
steps began to echo from the high vaulting of the roof. A messenger 
boy crossed the floor chanting an unintelligible name. 

The groups of traders gradually converged upon the corn and 
wheat pits, and on the steps of the latter, their arms crossed upon 
their knees, two men, one wearing a silk skull-cap all awry, conversed 
earnestly in low tones. 

Winston, a great, broad-shouldered, bass-voiced fellow of some 
thirty-five years, who was associated with Landry in executing the 
orders of the Gretry-Converse house, came up to him, and, omitting 
any salutation, remarked, deliberately, slowly: 

"What^s all this about this trouble between Turkey and England?" 

But before Landry could reply a third trader for the Gretry Com- 
pany joined the two. This was a young fellow named Rusbridge, 
lean, black-haired, a constant excitement glinting in his deephset eyes. 
7 



98 THE WORKER AND HIS WORK 

" Say," he exclaimed, " there's something iii that, there's some- 
thing in that! " 

" Where did you hear it? '^ demanded Landry. 

" Oh — everywhere." Rusbridge made a vague gesture with one 
arm. " Hirsch seemed to know all about it. It appears that there's 
talk of mobilizing the Mediterranean squadron." 

" Might ask that ' Inter-Ocean ' reporter. He'd be Hkely to know. 
I've seen him 'round here this morning, or you might telephone the 
Associated Press," suggested Landry. " The office never said a 
word to me." 

^' Oh, the * Associated.* They know a lot always, don't they? " 
jeered Winston. " Yes, I rung 'em up. They ^ couldn't confirm the 
rumor.' That's always the way. You can spend half a million a 
year in leased wires and special service and subscriptions to news 
agencies, and you get the first smell of news like this right here on 
the floor. Remember that time when the Northwestern millers sold 
a hundred and fifty thousand barrels at one lick? The floor was 
talking of it three hours before the news slips were sent 'round, or a 
single wire was in. Suppose we had waited for the Associated people 
or the Commercial people then? " 

" It's that Higgins-pasha incident, I'll bet,'^ observed Rusbridge, 
his eyes snapping. 

" I heard something about that this morning," returned Landry. 
" But only that it was " 

" There! What did I tell you? " interrupted Rusbridge. " I 
said it was everywhere. There's no smoke without some fire. And 
I wouldn't be a bit surprised if we get cables before noon that the 
British War Office had sent an ultimatum." 

And very naturally a few minutes later Winston, at that time 
standing on the steps of the com pit, heard from a certain broker, 
who had it from a friend who had just received a dispatch from some 
one " in the know," that the British Secretary of State for War had 
forwarded an ultimatum to the Porte, and that diplomatic relations 
between Turkey and England were about to be suspended. 

All in a moment the entire Floor seemed to be talking of nothing 
else, and on the outskirts of every group one could overhear the 
words: " Seizure of custom house," " ultimatum," " Eastern ques- 
tion," " Higgins-pasha incident.'* It was the rumor of the day, and 
before very long the pit traders began to receive a multitude of dis- 



THE WHEAT PIT 99 

patches countermanding selling orders, and directing them not to 
close out trades under certain very advanced quotations. The 
brokers began wiring their principals that the market promised to 
open strong and bullish. 

But by now it was near to half-past nine. From the Western 
Union desks the clicking of the throng of instruments rose into the air 
in an incessant staccato stridulatlon. The messenger boys ran back 
and forth at top speed, dodging in and out among the knots of clerks 
and traders, colliding with one another, and without interruption in- 
toning the names of those for whom they had dispatches. The throng 
of traders concentrated upon the pits, and at every moment the 
deep-toned hum of the murmur of many voices swelled like the 
rising of a tide. 

And at this moment, as Landry stood on the rim of the wheat 
pit, looking towards the telephone booth under the visitors' gallery, 
he saw the osseous, stoop-shouldered figure of Mr. Cressler — who, 
though he never speculated, appeared regularly upon the Board 
every morning — making his way towards one of the windows in the 
front of the building. His pocket was full of wheat, taken from a bag 
on one of the sample tables. Opening the window, he scattered the 
grain upon the sill, and stood for a long moment absorbed and inter- 
ested in the dazzling flutter of the wings of innumerable pigeons who 
came to settle upon the ledge, pecking the grain with little, nervous, 
fastidious taps of their yellow beaks. 

Landry cast a glance at the clock beneath the dial on the wall 
behind him. It was twenty-five minutes after nine. He stood in his 
accustomed place on the north side of the Wheat Pit, upon the top- 
most stair. The Pit was full. Below him and on either side of him 
were the brokers, scalpers, and traders — Hirsch, Semple, Kelly, Win- 
ston, and Rusbridge. The redoubtable Leay craft, who, bidding for 
himself, was supposed to hold the longest line of May wheat of 
any one man in the Pit, the insignificant Grossmann, to whose out- 
cries no one ever paid the least attention. Fairchild, Paterson, and 
Goodlock, the inseparable trio who represented the Porteous gang, 
silent men, middle-aged, who had but to speak in order to buy or 
sell a million bushels on the spot. And others, and still others, 
veterans of sixty-five, recruits just out of their teens, men who — 
some of them — in the past had for a moment dominated the entire 
Pit, but who now were content to play the part of " eighth-chasers," 



100 THE WORKER AND HIS WORK 

buying and selling on the same day, content with a profit of ten 
dollars. Others who might at that very moment be nursing plans 
which in a week^s time would make them millionaires; still others 
who, under a mask of nonchalance, strove to hide the chagrin of 
yesterday's defeat. And they were there, ready, inordinately alert, 
ears turned to the faintest sound, eyes searching for the vaguest 
trace of meaning in those of their rivals, nervous, keyed to the high- 
est tension, ready to thrust deep into the slightest opening, to spring, 
mercilessly, upon the smallest undefended spot. Grossmann perspired 
in the stress of the suspense, all but powerless to maintain silence 
till the signal should be given, drawing trembling fingers across his 
mouth. Winston, brawny, soHd, unperturbed, his hands behind his 
back, waited immovably planted on his feet with all the gravity of 
a statue, his eyes preternaturally watchful, keeping Kelly — ^whom he 
had divined had some " funny business " on hand — ^perpetually in 
sight. The Porteous trio — Fairchild, Paterson, and Goodlock — as if 
unalarmed, unassailable, all but turned their backs to the Pit, laugh- 
ing among themselves. 

The official reporter climbed to his perch in the little cage on the 
edge of the Pit, shutting the door after him. By now the chanting 
of the messenger boys was an uninterrupted chorus. From all sides 
of the building and in every direction they crossed and recrossed 
each other, always running, their hands full of yellow envelopes. 
From the telephone alcoves came the prolonged, musical rasp of the 
call bells. In the Western Union booths the keys of the multitude of 
instruments raged incessantly. Bare-headed young men hurried up 
to one another, conferred an instant comparing dispatches, then 
separated, darting away at top speed. Men called to each other 
half-way across the building. Over by the bulletin boards clerks and 
agents made careful memoranda of primary receipts, and noted down 
the amount of wheat on passage, the exports and the imports. 

And all these sounds, the chatter of the telegraph, the intoning 
of the messenger boys, the shouts and cries of clerks and traders, 
the shuffle and trampling of hundreds of feet, the whirring of tele- 
phone signals rose into the troubled air, and mingled overhead to 
form a vast note, prolonged, sustained, that reverberated from vault 
to vault of the airy roof, and issued from every doorway, every 
opened window, in one long roll of uninterrupted thunder. In the 
Wheat Pit the bids, no longer obedient of restraint, began one by one 



THE WHEAT PIT 101 

to burst out, like the first isolated shots of a skirmish line. Grossmann 
had flung out an arm crying: 

" 'Sell twenty-five May at ninety-five and an eighth," while 
Kelly and Semple had almost simultaneously shouted, " 'Give seven- 
eighths for May! " 

The official reporter had been leaning far over to catch the first 
quotations, one eye upon the clock at the end of the room. The hour 
and minute hands were at right angles. 

Then suddenly, cutting squarely athwart the vague crescendo 
of the floor came the single incisive stroke of a great gong. Instantly 
a tumult was unchained. Arms were flung upward in strenuous 
gestures, and from above the crowding heads in the Wheat Pit a 
multitude of hands, eager, the fingers extended, leaped into the air. 
All articulate expression was lost in the single explosion of sound 
as the traders surged downwards to the center of the Pit, grabbing 
each other, struggling towards each other, tramping, stamping, 
charging through with might and main. Promptly the hand on the 
great dial above the clock stirred and trembled, and as though driven 
by the tempest breath of the Pit moved upward through the degrees of 
its circle. It paused, wavered, stopped at length, and on the instant 
the himdreds of telegraph keys scattered throughout the building 
began clicking off the news to the whole country, from the Atlantic 
to the Pacific and from Mackinac to Mexico, that the Chicago market 
had made a slight advance and that May wheat, which had closed the 
day before at ninety-three and three-eighths, had opened that morning 
at ninety-four and a half. 

But the advance brought out no profit-taking sales. The redoubt- 
able Leaycraft and the Porteous trio, Fairchild, Paterson, and Good- 
lock, shook their heads when the Pit offered ninety-four for parts of 
their holdings. The price held firm. Goodlock even began to offer 
ninety-four. At every suspicion of a flurry Grossmann, always with 
the same gesture as though hurling a javelin, always with the same 
lamentable wail of distress, cried out: 

" 'Sell twenty-five May at ninety-five and a fourth." 
He held his five fingers spread to indicate the number of " con- 
tracts," or lots of five thousand bushels, which he wished to sell, 
each finger representing one " contract." 

And it was at this moment that selling orders began suddenly to 
pour in upon the Gretry- Converse traders. Even other houses — 



102 THE WORKER AND HIS WORK 

Teller and West, Burbank & Co,, Mattieson and Knight — received 
their share. The movement was inexplicable, puzzling. With a 
powerful Bull clique dominating the trading and every prospect of 
a strong market, who was it who ventured to sell short? 

Landry among others found himself commissioned to sell. His 
orders were to unload three hundred thousand bushels on any advance 
over and above ninety-four. He kept his eye on Leaycraft, certain 
that he would force up the figure, But, as it happened, it was not 
Leaycraft but the Porteous trio who made the advance. Standing 
in the center of the Pit, Paterson suddenly flung up his hand and 
drew it towards him, clutching the air — the conventional gesture 
of the buyer. 

*' 'Give an eighth for May." 

Landry was at him in a second. Twenty voices shouted " sold," 
and as many traders sprang towards him with outstretched arms. 
Landry, however, was before them, and his rush carried Paterson 
half-way across the middle space of the Pit. 

" Sold, sold." 

Paterson nodded, and as Landry noted down the transaction the 
hand on the dial advanced again, and again held firm. 

But after this the activity of the Pit fell away. The trading 
languished. By degrees the tension of the opening was relaxed. 
Landry, however, had refrained from selling more than ten " con- 
tracts " to Paterson. He had a feeling that another advance would 
come later on. Rapidly he made his plans. He would sell another 
fifty thousand bushels if the price went to ninety-four and a half, and 
would then *' feel " the market, letting go small lots here and there, 
to test its strength, then, the instant he felt the market strong enough, 
throw a full hundred thousand upon it with a rush before it had 
time to break. He could feel — almost at his very finger tips — ^how this 
market moved, how it strengthened, how it weakened. He knew just 
when to nurse it, to humor it, to let it settle, and when to crowd it, 
when to hustle it, when it would stand rough handling. 

Grossmann still uttered his plaint from time to time, but no one 
so much as pretended to listen. The Porteous trio and Leaycraft 
kept the price steady at ninety-four and an eighth, but showed no 
inclination to force it higher. For a full five minutes not a trade was 
reported. The Pit waited for the Report on the Visible Supply. 

And it was during this lull in the morning's business that the 



THE WHEAT PIT 103 

idiocy of the English ultimatum to the Porte melted away. As inex- 
plicably and as suddenly as the rumor had started, it now disap- 
pered. Everyone, simultaneously, seemed to ridicule it. England 
declare war on Turkey! Where was the joke? Who was the fool 
to have started that old, worn-out war scare? But, for all that, there 
was no reaction from the advance. It seemed to be understood that 
either Leaycraft or the Porteous crowd stood ready to support the 
market; and in place of the ultimatum story a feeling began to gain 
groimd that the expected report would indicate a falling off in the 
" visible," and that it was quite on the cards that the market might 
even advance another point. 

As the interest in the immediate situation declined, the crowd 
in the Pit grew less dense. Portions of it were deserted; even Gross- 
mann, discouraged, retired to a bench under the visitors' gallery. 
And a spirit of horse-play, sheer foolishness, strangely inconsistent 
with the hot-eyed excitement of the few moments after the opening, 
invaded the remaining groups. Leaycraft, the formidable, as well as 
Paterson of the Porteous gang, and even the solemn Winston, found 
an apparently inexhaustible diversion in folding their telegrams into 
pointed javelins and sending them sailing across the room, watch- 
ing the course of the missiles with profound gravity. A visitor in the 
gallery — no doubt a Western farmer on a holiday — Shaving put his 
feet upon the rail, the entire Pit began to groan " boots, boots, boots." 

A Uttle later a certain broker came scurrying across the floor 
from the direction of the telephone room. Panting, he flung himself 
up the steps of the Pit, forced his way among the traders with vig- 
orous workings of his elbows and shouted a bid. 

" He's sick," shouted Hirsch. *' Look out, he's sick. He^s going 
to have a fit." He grabbed the broker by both arms and hustled 
him into the center of the Pit. The others caught up the cry, a score 
of hands pushed the new-comer from man to man. The pit traders 
clutched him, pulled his necktie loose, knocked off his hat, vociferating 
all the while at top voice, " He's sick! He's sick! " 

Other brokers and traders came up, and Grossmann, mistaking 
the commotion for a flurry, ran into the Pit, his eyes wide, waving 
his arm and wailing: 

" 'Sell twenty-five May at ninety-five and a quarter." 

But the victim, good-natured, readjusted his battered hat, and 
again repeated his bid. 



104 THE WORKER AND HIS WORK 

" Ah, go to bed," protested Hirsch. 

" He's the man who struck Billy Paterson." 

" Say, a horse bit him. Look out for him, he's going to have 
a duck-fit." 

The incident appeared to be the inspiration for a new " josh " 
that had a great success, and a group of traders organized themselves 
into an " anti-cravat committee," and made the rounds of the Pit, 
twitching the carefully tied scarfs of the unwary out of place. Gross- 
mann, indignant at " t'ose monkey-doodle pizeness," withdrew from 
the center of the Pit. But while he stood in front of Leaycraft, his 
back turned, muttering his disgust, the latter, while carrying on a 
grave conversation with his neighbor, carefully stuck a file of paper 
javelins all around the Jew's hat band, and then — still without mirth 
and still continuing to talk — set them on fire. 

Landry imagined by now that ninety-four and an eighth was as 
high a figure as he could reasonably expect that morning, and so 
began to " work off " his selling orders. Little by little he sold the 
wheat " short," till all but one large lot was gone. 

Then all at once, and for no discoverable immediate reason, 
wheat, amid an explosion of shouts and vociferations, jumped to 
ninety-four and a quarter, and before the Pit could take breath, had 
advanced another eighth, broken to one-quarter, then jumped to the 
five-eighths mark. 

It was the Report on the Visible Supply beyond question, and 
though it had not yet been posted, this sudden flurry was a sign that it 
was not only near at hand, but would be bullish. 

A few moments later it was bulletined in the gallery beneath the 
dial, and proved a tremendous surprise to nearly every man upon the 
floor. No one had imagined the supply was so ample, so all-sufficient 
to meet the demand. Promptly the Pit responded. Wheat began to 
pour in heavily. Hirsch, Kelly, Grossmann, Leaycraft, the stolid 
Winston, and the excitable Rusbridge were hard at it. The price 
began to give. Suddenly it broke sharply. The hand on the great 
dial dropped to ninety-three and seven-eighths. 

Landry was beside himself. He had not foreseen this break. 
There was no reckoning on that cursed " visible," and he still had 
50,000 bushels to dispose of. There was no telling now how low the 
price might sink. He must act quickly, radically. He fought his 
way towards the Porteous crowd, reached over the shoulder of the 



THE WHEAT PIT lOS 

little Jew Grossmarm, who stood in his way, and thnist his hand 
almost into Paterson's face, shouting: 

" 'Sell fifty May at seven-eighths." 

It was the last one of his unaccountable selling orders of the 
early morning. 

The other shook his head. 

" 'Sell fifty May at three-quarters." 

Suddenly some instinct warned Landry that another break was 
coming. It was in the very air around him. He could almost physi- 
cally feel the pressure of renewed avalanches of wheat crowding down 
the price. Desperate, he grabbed Paterson by the shoulder. 

" 'Sell fifty May at five-eighths." 

" Take it," vociferated the other, as though answering a challenge. 

And in the heart of this confusion, in this downward rush of the 
price. Luck, the golden goddess, passed with the flirt and flash of 
glittering wings, and hardly before the ticker in Gretry's office had 
signalled the decline, the memorandum of the trade was down upon 
Landry's card and Curtis Jadwin stood pledged to deliver, before 
noon on the last day of May, one million bushels of wheat into the 
hands of the representatives of the great Bulls of the Board of Trade. 

But by now the real business of the morning was over. The Pit 
knew it. Grossmann, obstinate, hypnotized as it were by one idea, 
still stood in his accustomed place on the upper edge of the Pit, 
and from time to time, with the same despairing gesture, emitted 
his doleful outcry of " 'Sell twenty-five May at ninety-five and 
three-quarters." 

Nobody listened. The traders stood around in expectant atti- 
tudes, looking into one another's faces, waiting for what they could 
not exactly say; loath to leave the Pit lest something should " turn 
up " the moment their backs were turned. 

By degrees the clamor died away, ceased, began again irregularly, 
then abruptly stilled. Here and there a bid was called, an offer made, 
like the intermittent crack of small arms after the stopping of 
the cannonade. 

" 'Sell five May at one-eighth." 

" 'Sell twenty at one-quarter." 

" 'Give one-eighth for May." 

For an instant the shoutings were renewed. Then suddenly the 
gong struck. The traders began slowly to leave the Pit. One of the 



106 THE WORKER AND HIS WORK 

floor officers, an old fellow in uniform and vizored cap, appeared, 
gently shouldering towards the door the groups wherein the bidding 
and offering were still languidly going on. His voice full of remon- 
stration, he repeated continually: 

" Time's up, gentlemen. Go on now and get your lunch. Lunch 
time now. Go on now, or I'll have to report you. Time's up." 

The tide set towards the doorways. In the gallery the few visitors 
rose, putting on coats and wraps. Over by the check counter, to 
the right of the south entrance to the floor, a throng of brokers and 
traders jostled each other, reaching over one another's shoulders for 
hats and ulsters. In steadily increasing numbers they poured out 
of the north and south entrances, on their way to turn in their 
trading cards to the offices. 

Little by little the floor emptied. The provision and grain pits 
were deserted, and as the clamor of the place lapsed away the tele- 
graph instruments began to make themselves heard once more, to- 
gether with the chanting of the messenger boys. 

Swept clean in the morning, the floor itself, seen now through 
the thinning groups, was littered from end to end with scattered 
grain — oats, wheat, corn, and barley, with wisps of hay, peanut 
shells, apple parings, and orange peel, with torn newspapers, odds and 
ends of memoranda, crushed paper darts, and above all with a count- 
less multitude of yellow telegraph forms, thousands upon thousands, 
crumpled and muddied under the trampling of innumerable feet. It 
was the debris of the battle-field, the abandoned impedimenta and 
broken weapons of contending armies, the detritus of conflict, torn, 
broken, and rent, that at the end of each day's combat encum- 
bered the field. 

At last even the click of the last of the telegraph keys died down. 
Shouldering themselves into their overcoats, the operators departed, 
calling back and forth to one another, making " dates," and cracking 
jokes. Washerwomen appeared with steaming pails, porters pushing 
great brooms before them began gathering the refuse of the floor 
into heaps. 

Between the wheat and com pits a band of young fellows, some 
of them absolute boys, appeared. These were the settlement clerks. 
They carried long account books. It was their duty to get the trades 
of the day into a " ring " — to trace the course of a lot of wheat which 
had changed hands perhaps a score of times during the trading — and 



THE WHEAT PIT 107 

their calls of " Wheat sold to Teller and West," " May wheat sold 
to Burbank & Co.," " May oats sold to Matthewson and Knight," 
" Wheat sold to Gretry, Converse & Co.," began to echo from wall 
to wall of the almost deserted room. 

A cat, grey and striped, and wearing a dog-collar of nickel and 
red leather, issued from the coat-room and picked her way across 
the floor. Evidently she was in a mood of the most ingratiating friend- 
liness, and as one after another of the departing traders spoke to her, 
raised her tail in the air and arched her back against the legs of the 
empty chairs. The janitor put in an appearance, lowering the tall col- 
ored windows with a long rod. A noise of hammering and the scrape 
of saws began to issue from a corner where a couple of carpenters 
tinkered about one of the sample tables. 

Then at last even the settlement clerks took themselves off. At 
once there was a great silence, broken only by the harsh rasp of the 
carpenters' saws and the voice of the janitor exchanging jokes with 
the washerwomen. The sound of footsteps in distant quarters 
re-echoed as if in a church. 

The washerwomen invaded the floor, spreading soapy and steam- 
ing water before them. Over by the sample tables a negro porter in 
shirt-sleeves swept entire bushels of spilled wheat, crushed, broken, 
and sodden, into his dust pans. 

The day's campaign was over. It was past two o'clock. On the 
great dial against the eastern wall the indicator stood — sentinel fash- 
ion — at ninety-three. Not till the following morning would the whirl- 
pool, the great central force that spun the Niagara of wheat in its 
grip, thunder and bellow again. 

Later on even the washerwomen, even the porter and janitor, 
departed. An unbroken silence, the peacefulness of an untroubled 
calm, settled over the place. The rays of the afternoon sun flooded 
through the west windows in long parallel shafts full of floating golden 
motes. There was no sound; nothing stirred. The floor of the Board 
of Trade was deserted. Alone, on the edge of the abandoned WTieat 
Pit, in a spot where the sunlight fell warmest — an atom of life, lost 
in the immensity of the empty floor — the grey cat made her toilet, 
diligently licking the fur on the inside of her thigh, one leg, as if dis- 
located, thrust into the air above her head. 



THE MAN WITHIN HIM 
an advertising experience of jock mcchesney 

By Edna Ferber 

They used to do it much more picturesquely. They rode in coats 
of scarlet, in the crisp, clear morning, to the winding of horns and 
the baying of hounds — to the thud-thud of hoofs, and the crackle 
of underbrush. Across fresh-plowed fields they went, crashing through 
forest paths, leaping ditches, taking fences, scrambling up the inclines, 
pelting down the hillside, helter-skelter, until, panting, wide-eyed, 
eager, blood-hungry, the hunt closed in at the death. 

The scarlet coat has sobered down to the somber gray and the 
snuffy brown of the unromantic garment known as the business suit. 
The winding horn is become a goblet, and its notes are the tinkle of 
ice against glass. The baying of hounds has harshened to the squawk 
of the motor siren. The fresh plowed field is a blue print, the forest 
maze a roll of plans and specifications. Each fence is a business bar- 
rier. Every ditch is of a competitor's making, dug craftily so that the 
clumsy-footed may come a cropper. All the romance is out of it, all 
the color, all the joy. But two things remain the same: The look 
in the face of the hunter as he closed in on the fox is the look in the 
face of him who sees the coveted contract lying ready for the finishing 
stroke of his pen. And his words are those of the hunter of long ago 
as, eyes agleam, teeth bared, muscles still taut with the tenseness of 
the chase, he waves the paper high in air and cries, " I've 
made a killing! " 

For two years Jock McChesney had watched the field as it swept 
by in its patient, devious, cruel game of Hunt the Contract. But he 
had never been in at the death. Those two years had taught him how 
to ride; to take a fence; to leap a ditch. He had had his awkward 
bumps, and his clumsy falls. He had lost his way more than once. 
But he had always groped his way back again, stumblingly, through 
the dusk. Jock McChesney was the youngest man on the Berg, 
Shriner Advertising Company's big staff of surprisingly young men. 
So young that the casual glance did not reveal to you the marks 
108 



THE MAN WITHIN HIM 109 

that the strain of those two years had left on his boyish face. But 
the marks were there. 

Nature etches with the most delicate of points. She knows the 
cunning secret of light and shadow. You scarcely realize that she 
has been at work. A faint line about the mouth, a fairy tracing at the 
corners of the eyes, a mere vague touch just at the nostrils — and the 
thing is done. 

Even Emma McChesney's eyes — those mother-eyes which make 
the lynx seem a mole — had failed to note the subtle change. Then, 
suddenly, one night, the lines leaped out at her. 

They were seated at opposite sides of the book-littered library 
table in the living-room of the cheerful up-town apartment which 
was the realization of the nightly dream which Mrs. Emma McChes- 
ney had had in her ten years on the road for the T. A. Buck Feather- 
loom Petticoat Company. Jock McChesney's side of the big table 
was completely covered with the mass of copy-paper, rough sketches, 
photographs and drawings that make up an advertising lay-out. He 
was bent over the work, absorbed, intent, his forearms resting on the 
table. Emma McChesney glanced up from her magazine just as Jock 
bent forward to reach a scrap of paper that had fluttered across the 
way. The lamplight fell full on his face. And Emma McChesney 
saw. The hand that held the magazine fell to her lap. Her lips 
were parted slightly. She sat very quietly, her eyes never leaving 
the face that frowned so intently over the littered table. The room 
had been very quiet before — Jock busy with his work, his mother 
interested in her magazine. But this silence was different. There was 
something electric in it. It was a silence that beats on the brain like 
a noise. Jock McChesney, bent over his work, heard it, felt it, and, 
oppressed by it, looked up suddenly. He met those two eyes opposite. 

" Spooks? Or is it my godlike beauty which holds you thus? 
Or is my face dirty? " 

Emma McChesney did not smile. She laid her magazine on 
the table, face down, and leaned forward, her staring eyes still 
fixed on her son's face. 

" Look here, young 'un. Are you working too hard? " 

" Me? Now? This stuff you mean ? " 

"No; I mean in the last year. Are they piling it up on you? " 

Jock laughed a laugh that was nothing less than a failure, so 
little of real mirth did it contain. 



no THE WORKER AND HIS WORK 

"Piling it up! Lord, no! I wish they would. That's the 
trouble. They don't give me a chance." 

" A chance! Why, that's not true, son. You've said yourself 
that there are men who have been in the office three times as long as 
you have, who never have had the opportunities that they've 
given you." 

It was as though she had touched a current that thrilled him to 
action. He pushed back his chair and stood up, one hand thrust into 
his pocket, the other passing quickly over his head from brow to nape 
with a quick, nervous gesture that was new to him. 

" And why! " he flung out. " Why! Not because they like the 
way I part my hair. They don't do business that way up there. 
It's because I've made good, and those other dubs haven't. That's 
why. They've let me sit in at the game. But they won't let me take 
any tricks. I've been an apprentice hand for two years now. I'm 
tired of it. I want to be in on a killing. I want to taste blood. I 
want a chance at some of the money — real money." 

Emma McChesney sat back in her chair and surveyed the angry 
figure before her with quiet, steady eyes. 

" I might have known that only one thing could bring those lines 
into your face, son." She paused a moment. " So you want money 
as badly as all that, do you? " 

Jock's hand came down with a thwack on the papers before him. 

" Want it! You just bet I want it." 

" Do I know her? " asked Emma McChesney quietly. 

Jock stopped short in his excited pacing up and down the room. 

" Do you know — Why, I didn't say there — : What makes you 
think that ? " 

" When a youngster like you, whose greatest worry has been 
whether Harvard'll hold 'em again this year, with Baxter out, begins 
to howl about not being appreciated in business, and to wear a late 
fall line of wrinkles where he has been smooth before, I feel justified 
in saying, ' Do I know her? ' " 

" Well, it isn't anyone-^at least, it isn't what you mean you think 
it is when you say you -" 

" Careful there! You'll trip. Never you mind what I mean I 
think it is when I say. Count ten, and then just tell me what you 
think you mean." 

Jock passed his hand over his head again with that nervous little 



THE MAN WITHIN HIM HI 

gesture. Then he sat down, a little wearily. He stared moodily down 
at the pile of papers before him. His mother faced him quietly 
across the table. 

" Grace Gait's getting twice as much as I am," Jock broke out, 
with savage suddenness. " The first year I didn't mind. A fellow 
gets accustomed, these days, to seeing women breaking into all the 
professions and getting away with men-size salaries. But her pay 
check doubles mine — more than doubles it." 

" It's been my experience," observed Emma McChesney, " that 
when a firm condescends to pay a woman twice as much as a man, 
that means she's worth six times as much." 

A painful red crept into Jock's face. " Maybe. Two years ago 
that would have sounded reasonable to me. Two years ago, when I 
walked down Broadway at night, a fifty-foot electric sign at Forty- 
second was just an electric sign to me. Just part of the town's 
decoration, like the chorus girls, and the midnight theatre crowds. 
Now — well, now every blink of every red and yellow globe is cram- 
med full of meaning. I know the power that advertising has; how it 
influences our manners, and our morals, and our minds, and our 
health. It regulates the food we eat, and the clothes we wear, and 
the books we read, and the entertainment we seek. It's colossal, 
that's what it is ! It's " 

" Keep on like that for another two years, sonny, and no busi- 
ness banquet will be complete without you. The next thing you 
know you'll be addressing the Y. M. C. A. advertising classes on * The 
Young Man in Business.' " 

Jock laughed a rueful little laugh. " I didn't mean to make a 
speech. I was just trying to say that I've served my apprenticeship. 
It hurts a fellow's pride. You can't hold your head up before a girl 
when you know her salary's twice yours, and you know that she 
knows it. Why, look at Mrs. Hoffman, who's with the Dowd Agency. 
Of course she's a wonder, even if her face does look like the fifty- 
eighth variety. She can write copy that lifts a campaign right out of 
the humdrum class, and makes it luminous. Her husband works in 
a bank somewhere. He earns about as much as Mrs. Hoffman pays 
the least of her department subordinates. And he's so subdued that 
he side-steps when he walks, and they call him the human jelly-fish.'* 

Emma McChesney was regarding her son with a little puzzled 



112 THE WORKER AND HIS WORK 

frown. Suddenly she reached out and tapped the topmost of the 
scribbled sheets strewn the length of Jockos side of the table. 

" What's all this? " 

Jock tipped back his chair and surveyed the clutter before him. 

" That," said he, " is what is known on the stage as ' the papers.' 
And it's the real plot of this piece." 

"M-m-m — I thought so. Just favor me with a scenario, will you?" 

Half-grinning, half-serious, Jock stuck his thumbs in the arm- 
holes of his waistcoat, and began. 

" Scene: Offices of the Berg, Shriner Advertising Company. 
Time, the present. Characters: Jock McChesney, handsome, dar- 
ing, brilliant " 

" Suppose you — er— skip the characters, however fascinating, and 
get to the action." 

Jock McChesney brought the tipped chair down on all fours with 
a thud, and stood up. The grin was gone. He was as serious as he 
had been in the midst of his tirade of five minutes before. 

" All right. Here it is. And don't blame me if it sounds like 
cheap melodrama. This stuff," and he waved a hand toward the 
paper-laden table, " is an advertising campaign plan for the Griebler 
Gum Company, of St. Louis. Oh, don't look impressed. The office 
hasn't handed me any such commission. I just got the idea like a 
flash, and I've been working it out for the last two weeks. It worked 
itself out, almost — the way a really scorching idea does, sometimes. 
This Griebler has been advertising for years. You know the Grieb- 
ler gum. But it hasn't been the right sort of advertising. Old 
Griebler, the original gum man, had fogy notions about advertising, 
and as long as he lived they had to keep it down. He died a few 
months ago — ^you must have read of it. Left a regular mint. Ben 
Griebler, the oldest son, started right in to clean out the cobwebs. Of 
course, the advertising end of it has come in for its share of the soap 
and water. He wants to make a clean sweep of it. Every adver- 
tising firm in the country has been angling for the contract. It's 
going to be a real one. Two-thirds of the crowd have submitted 
plans. And that's just where my kick comes in. The Berg, Shriner 
Company makes it a rule never to submit advance plans." 

" Excuse me if I seem a trifle rude," interrupted Mrs. McChes- 
ney, " but I'd like to know where you think youVe been wronged 
in this." 



THE MAN WITHIN HIM 113 

" Right here! " replied Jock, and he slapped his pocket, " and 
here," he pointed to his head. " Two spots so vital that they make 
old Achilles's heel seem armor-plated. Ben Griebler is one of the 
show-me kind. He wants value received for money expended, and 
while everybody knows that he has a loving eye on the Berg, Shriner 
crowd, he won't sign a thing until he knows v/hat he's getting. A 
firm's record, standing, staff, equipment, mean nothing to him." 

" But, Jock, I still don't see " 

Jock gathered up a sheaf of loose papers and brandished them in 
the air. " This is where I come in. I've got a plan here that will 
fetch this Griebler person. Oh, I'm not dreaming. I outlined it for 
Sam Hupp, and he was crazy about it. Sam Hupp had some sort of 
plan outlined himself. But he said this made his sound as dry as 
cigars in Denver. And you know yourself that Sam Hupp's 
copy is so brilliant that he could sell brewery advertising to a 
temperance magazine." 

Emma McChesney stood up. She looked a little impatient, and 
a trifle puzzled. " But why all this talk! I don't get you. Take 
your plan to Mr. Berg. If it's what you think it is he'll see it 
quicker than any other human being, and he'll probably fall on your 
neck and invest you in royal robes and give you a mahogany desk 
all your own." 

" Oh, what's the good! " retorted Jock disgustedly. " This Grieb- 
ler has an appointment at the office to-morrow. He'll be closeted 
with the Old Man. They'll call in Hupp. But never a plan will 
they reveal. It's against their code of ethics. Ethics! I'm sick of 
the word. I suppose you'd say I'm lucky to be associated with a firm 
like that, and perhaps I am. But I wish in the name of all the gods 
of Business that they weren't so bloomin' conservative. Ethics! 
They're all balled up in 'em like Henry James in his style." 

Emma McChesney came over from her side of the table and stood 
very close to her son. She laid one hand very lightly on his arm and 
looked up into the sullen, angry young face. 

''I've seen older men than you are, Jock, and better men, and 
bigger men, wearing that same look, and for the same reason. Every 
ambitious man or woman in business wears it at one time or another. 
Sooner or later, Jock, you'll have your chance at the money end of 
this game. If you don't care about the thing you call ethics, it'll be 
8 



114 THE WORKER AND HIS WORK 

sooner. If you do care, it will be later. It rests with you, but it's 
bound to come, because you've got the stuff in you.'* 

" Maybe," replied Jock the cynical. But his face lost some of 
it's sullenness as he looked down at that earnest, vivid countenance 
upturned to his. " Maybe. It sounds all right, Mother — in the story 
books. But I'm not quite sold on it. These days it isn't so much 
what you've got in you that counts as what you can bring out. I 
know the young man's slogan used to be ' Work and Wait,' or some- 
thing pretty like that. But these days they've boiled it down to one 
word — ' Produce '! " 

" The marvel of it is that there aren't more of 'em," observed 
Emma McChesney sadly. 

" More what? " 

" More lines. Here," — she touched his forehead — " and here," 
— she touched his eyes. 

" Lines! " Jock swung to face a mirror. " Good! I'm so infer- 
nally young-looking that no one takes me seriously. It's darned hard 
trying to convince people you're a captain of finance when you look 
like an errand boy." 

From the center of the room Mrs. McChesney watched the boy 
as he surveyed himself in the glass. And as she gazed there came a 
frightened look into her eyes. It was gone in a minute, and in its 
place came a curious little gleam, half amused, half pugnacious. 

" Jock McChesney, if I thought that you meant half of what 
you've said to-night about honor, and ethics, and all that, I'd " 

" Spank me, I suppose," said the young six-footer. 

" No," and all the humor had fled, " I — ^Jock, I've never said 
much to you about your father. But I think you know that he was 
what he was to the day of his death. You were just about eight 
when I made up my mind that life with him was impossible. I said 
then — and you were all I had, son — that I'd rather see you dead than 
to have you turn out to be a son of your father. Don't make me 
remember that wish, Jock." 

Two quick steps and his arms were about her. His face was all 
contrition. *' Why — Mother! I didn't mean — You see, this is 
business, and I'm crazy to make good, and it's such a fight " 

" Don't I know it? " demanded Emma McChesney. " I guess 
your mother hasn't been sitting home embroidering lunch-cloths these 
last fifteen years." She lifted her head from the boy's shoulder. 



THE MAN WITHIN HIM 115 

" And now, son, considering me, not as your doting mother, but in my 
business capacity as secretary of the T. A. Buck Featherloom Petti- 
coat Company, suppose you reveal to me the inner workings of this 
plan of yours. I'd like to know if you really are the advertising 
wizard that you tliink you are." 

So it was that long after Annie's dinner dishes had ceased to 
clatter in the kitchen; long after she had put her head in at the door 
to ask, " Aigs 'r cakes for breakfast? " long after those two busy 
brains should have rested in sleep, the two sat at either side of the 
light-flooded table, the face of one glowing as he talked, the face of 
the other sparkling as she listened. And at midnight: 

" Why, you infant wonder! " exclaimed Emma McChesney. 

At nine o'clock next morning when Jock McChesney entered the 
offices of the Berg, Shriner Advertising Company he carried a flat, 
compact bundle of papers under his arm encased in protecting covers 
of pasteboard, and further secured by bands of elastic. This he 
carried to his desk, deposited in a drawer, and locked the drawer. 

By eleven o'clock the things which he had predicted the night 
before had come to pass. A plump little man, with a fussy manner 
and Western clothes, had been ushered into Bartholomew Berg's pri- 
vate office. Instinct told him that this was Griebler. Jock left his 
desk and strolled up to get the switchboard operator's confirmation of 
his guess. Half an hour later Sam Hupp hustled by and disappeared 
into the Old Man's sanctum. 

Jock fingered the upper left-hand drawer of his desk. The mad- 
dening blankness of that closed door! If only he could find some 
excuse for walking into that room — any old excuse, no matter how 
wild! — just to get a chance at it 

His telephone rang. He picked up the receiver, his eye on the 
closed door, his thoughts inside that room. 

" Mr. Berg wants to see you right away," came the voice of the 
switchboard operator. 

Something seemed to give way inside — something in the region of 
his brain — no, his heart — no, his lungs 

" Well, can you beat that! " said Jock McChesney aloud, in a 
kind of trance of joy. " Can — you — beat— that! " 

Then he buttoned the lower button of his coat, shrugged his 
shoulders with an extra wriggle at the collar (the modern hero's 



116 THE WORKER AND HIS WORK 

method of girding up his loins), and walked calmly into Bartholo- 
mew Berg's very private office. 

In the second that elapsed between the opening and the closing of 
the door Jock's glance swept the three men — Bartholomew Berg, 
quiet, inscrutable, seated at his great table-desk; Griebler, lost in the 
depths of a great leather chair, smoking fussily and twitching with a 
hundred little restless, irritating gestures; Sam Hupp, standing at the 
opposite side of the room, hands in pockets, attitude argumentative. 

" This is Mr. McChesney," said Bartholomew Berg. " Mr. 
Griebler, McChesney." 

Jock came forward, smiling that charming smile of his. " Mr. 
Griebler," he said, extending his hand, *' this is a great pleasure." 

"Hm! " exploded Ben Griebler, '^ I didn't know they picked 
'em so young." 

His voice was a piping falsetto that somehow seemed to match 
his restless little eyes. 

Jock thrust his hands hurriedly into his pockets. He felt his 
face getting scarlet. 

" They're — ah — using 'em young this year," said Bartholomew 
Berg. His voice sounded bigger, and smoother, and pleasanter than 
ever in contrast with that other's shrill tone. " I prefer 'em young, 
myself. You'll never catch McChesney using ' in the last analysis ' 
to drive home an argument. He has a new idea about every nine- 
teen minutes, and every other one's a good one, and every nineteenth 
or so's an inspiration." The Old Man laughed one of his low, 
chuckling laughs. 

" Hm — that so? " piped Ben Griebler. " Up in my neck of the 
woods we aren't so long on inspiration. We're just working men, 
and we wear working clothes " 

" Oh, now," protested Berg, his eyes twinkling, " McChesney's 
necktie and socks and handkerchief may form one lovely, blissful 
color scheme, but that doesn't signify at all that his advertising 
schemes are not just as carefully and artistically blended." 

Ben Griebler looked shrewdly up at Jock through narrowed lids. 
" Maybe. I'll talk to you in a minute, young man — that is — " he 
turned quickly upon Berg — " if that isn't against your crazy prin- 
ciples, too? " 

" Why, not at all," Bartholomew Berg assured him. " Not at 
all. You do me an injustice." 



THE MAN WITHIN HIM 117 

Griebler moved up closer to the broad table. The two fell into a 
low- voiced talk. Jock looked rather helplessly around at Sam Hupp. 
That alert gentleman was signalling him frantically with head and 
wagging finger. Jock crossed the big room to Hupp's side. The two 
moved off to a window at the far end. 

" Give heed to your unkie/' said Sam Hupp, talking very rapidly, 
very softly, and out of one comer of his mouth. " This Griebler 's 
looking for an advertising manager. He's as pig-headed as a — a — 
well, as a pig, I suppose. But it's a corking chance, youngster, and 
the Old Man's just recommended you — strong. Now " 

" Me ! " exploded Jock. 

" Shut up! " hissed Hupp. " Two or three years with that firm 
would be the making of you — ^if you made good, of course. And you 
could. They want to move their factory here from St. Louis within 
the next few years. Now listen. When he talks to you, you play up 
the keen, alert stuff with a dash of sophistication, see? If you can 
keep your mouth shut and throw a kind of a canny, I-get-you look 
in your eyes, all the better. He's gabby enough for two. Try 
a line of talk that is filled with the fire and enthusiasm of youth, 
combined with the good judgment and experience of middle age, 
and you've '^ 

" Say, look here," stammered Jock. " Even if I was Warfield 
enough to do all that, d'you honestly think — me an advertising man- 
ager! — with a salary that Griebler " 

" You nervy little shrimp, go in and win. He'll pay five thousand 
if he pays a cent. But he wants value for money expended. Now 
I've tipped you off. You make your killing " 

" Oh, McChesney! " called Bartholomew Berg, glancing round. 

" Yes, sir! " said Jock, and stood before him in the same moment. 

" Mr. Griebler is looking for a competent, enthusiastic, hard- 
working man as advertising manager. I've ^oken to him of you. I 
know what you can do. Mr. Griebler might trust my judgment in 
this, but " 

" I'll trust my own judgment," snapped Ben Griebler. " It's 
good enough for me." 

" Very well," returned Bartholomew Berg suavely. " And if you 
decide to place your advertising future in the hands of the Berg, 
Shriner Company " 

" Now look here," interrupted Ben Griebler again. " 111 tie up 



118 THE WORKER AND HIS WORK 

with you people when youVe shaken something out of your cuffs. 
I'm not the kind that buys a pig in a poke. We're going to spend 
money — real money — in this campaign of ours. But I'm not such a 
come-on as to hand you half a million or so and get a promise in 
return. I want your plans, and I want 'em in full." 

A little exclamation broke from Sam Hupp. He checked it, but 
not before Berg's curiously penetrating pale blue eyes had glanced up 
at him, and away again. 

" I've told you, Mr. Griebler," went on Bartholomew Berg's pa- 
tient voice, " just why the thing you insist on is impossible. This 
firm does not submit advance copy. Every business commission that 
comes to us is given all the skill, and thought, and enthusiasm, and 
careful planning that this office is capable of. You know our record. 
This is a business of ideas. And ideas are too precious, too perish- 
able, to spread in the market place for all to see." 

Ben Griebler stood up. His cigar waggled furiously between his 
lips as he talked. 

" I know something else that don't stand spreading in the mar- 
ket place. Berg. And that's money. It's too perishable, too." He 
pointed a stubby finger at Jock. " Does this fool rule of yours apply 
to this young fellow, too? " 

Bartholomew Berg seemed to grow more patient, more self-con- 
tained as the other man's self-control slipped rapidly away. 

" It goes for every man and woman in this office, Mr. Griebler. 
This young chap, McChesney here, might spend weeks and months 
building up a comprehensive advertising plan for you. He'd spend 
those weeks studying your business from every possible angle. Per- 
haps it would be a plan that would require a year of waiting before 
the actual advertising began to appear. And then you might lose 
faith in the plan. A waiting game is a hard game to play. Some 
other man's idea, that promised quicker action, might appeal to you. 
And when it appeared we'd very likely find our own original idea 
incorporated in " 

" Say, look here! " squeaked Ben Griebler, his face dully red. 
" D'you mean to imply that I'd steal your plan! D'you mean to sit 
there and tell me to my face " 

" Mr. Griebler, I mean that that thing happens constantly in this 
business. We're almost powerless to stop it. Nothing spreads 
quicker than a new idea. Compared to it a woman's secret is a 
sealed book." 



THE MAN WITHIN HIM 119 

Ben Griebler removed the cigar from his lips. He was stuttering 
with anger. With a mingling of despair and boldness Jock saw the 
advantage of that stuttering moment and seized on it. He stepped 
close to the broad table-desk, resting both hands on it and leaning 
forward slightly in his eagerness. 

" Mr. Berg — I have a plan. Mr. Hupp can tell you. It came to 
me when I first heard that the Grieblers were going to broaden out. 
It's a real idea. I'm sure of that. I've worked it out in detail. Mr. 
Hupp himself said it — Why, I've got the actual copy. And it's 
new. Absolutely. It never " 

" Trot it out! " shouted Ben Griebler. " I'd like to see just one 
idea, anyway, around this shop.'^ 

" McChesney," said Bartholomew Berg, not raising his voice. His 
eyes rested on Jock with the steady, penetrating gaze that was 
peculiar to him. More foolhardy men than Jock McChesney had 
faltered and paused, abashed, under those eyes. " McChesney, your 
enthusiasm for your work is causing you to forget one thing that 
must never be forgotten in this office." 

Jock stepped back. His lower lip was caught between his teeth. 
At the same moment Ben Griebler snatched up his hat from the 
table, clapped it on his head at an absurd angle and, bristling like a 
fighting cock, confronted the three men. 

" I've got a couple of rules myself," he cried, " and don't you 
forget it. When you get a little spare time, you look up St. Louis and 
find out what state it's in. The slogan of that state is my slogan, 
you bet. If you think I'm going to make you a present of the money 
that it took my old man fifty years to pile up, then you don't know 
that Griebler is a German name. Good day, gents." 

He stalked to the door. There he turned dramatically and lev- 
eled a forefinger at Jock. " They have got you roped and tied. But 
I think you're a comer. If you change your mind, kid, come and 
see me." 

The door slammed to behind him. 

" Whew! " whistled Sam Hupp, passing a handkerchief over his 
bald spot. 

Bartholomew Berg reached out with one great capable hand and 
swept toward him a pile of papers. " Oh, well, you can't blame him. 
Advertising has been a scream for so long. Griebler doesn't know 
the difference between advertising, publicity, and bunk. He'll learn. 



120 THE WORKER AND HIS WORK 

But it'll be an awfully expensive course. Now, Hupp, let's go over 
this Kalamazoo account. That'll be all, McChesney." 

Jock turned without a word. He walked quickly through 
the outer office, into the great main room. There he stopped at 
the switchboard. 

" Er— Miss Grimes," he said, smiling charmingly, " where's this 
Mr. Griebler, of St. Louis, stopping; do you know his hotel? " 

" Where would be stop? " retorted the wise Miss Grimes. " Look 
at him! The Waldorf, of course." 

" Thanks," said Jock, still smiling. And went back to his desk. 
At five Jock left the office. Under his arm he carried the flat 
pasteboard package secured by elastic bands. At five-fifteen he 
walked swiftly down the famous corridor of the great red stone hotel. 
The colorful glittering crowd that surged all about him he seemed 
not to see. He made straight for the main desk with its battalion 
of clerks. 

" Mr. Griebler in? Mr. Ben Griebler, St. Louis? " 
The question set in motion the hotel's elaborate system of inves- 
tigation. At last: " Not in." 

" Do you know when he will be in? " That futile question. 
"Can't say. He left no word. Do you want to leave your name?" 
"N-no. Would he — does he stop at this desk when he comes in?" 
He was an unusually urbane hotel clerk. " Why, usually they 
leave their key^ and get their mail from the floor clerk. But Mr. 
Griebler seems to prefer the main desk." 

" I'll — wait," said Jock. And seated in one of the great throne- 
like chairs, he waited. He sat there, slim and boyish, while the laugh- 
ing, chattering crowd swept all about him. If you sit long enough in 
that foyer you will learn all there is to learn about life. An amazing 
sight it is — that crowd. Baraboo helps swell it, and Spokane, and 
Berlin, and Budapest and Pekin, and Paris, and Waco, Texas. So 
varied it is, so cosmopolitan, that if you sit there patiently enough, 
and watch sharply enough you will now and again even see a chance 
New Yorker. 

From door to desk Jock's eyes swept. The afternoon-tea crowd, 
in paradise feathers, and furs, and frock coats swam back and forth. 
He saw it give way to the dinner throng, satin-shod, bejeweled, hurry- 
ing through its oysters, swallowing unbelievable numbers of cloudy- 
amber drinks, and golden-brown drinks, and maroon drinks, then 



THE MAN WITHIN HIM 121 

gathering up its furs and rushing theaterward. He was still sitting 
there when that crowd, its eight o'clock freshness somewhat sullied, 
its sparkle a trifle dimmed, swept back for more oysters, more cloudy- 
amber and golden-brown drinks. 

At half-hour intervals, then at hourly intervals, the figure in the 
great chair stirred, rose, and walked to the desk. 

" Has Mr. Griebler come in? " 

The supper throng, its laugh a little ribald, its talk a shade high- 
pitched, drifted toward the street, or was wafted up in elevators. 
The throng thinned to an occasional group. Then these became rarer 
and rarer. The revolving door admitted one man, or two, perhaps, 
who lingered not at all in the unaccustomed quiet of the great 
glittering lobby. 

The figure of the watcher took on a pathetic droop. The eyelids 
grew leaden. To open them meant an almost superhuman effort. 
The stare of the new night clerks grew more and more hostile and 
suspicious. A grayish pallor had settled down on the boy's face. 
And those lines of the night before stood out for all to see. 

In the stillness of the place the big revolving door turned once 
more, complainingly. For the thousandth time Jock's eyes lifted 
heavily. Then they flew wide open. The drooping figure straight- 
ened electrically. Half a dozen quick steps and Jock stood in the 
pathway of Ben Griebler who, rather ruffled and imtidy, had blown 
in on the wings of the morning. 

He stared a moment. " Well, what " 

" I've been waiting for you here since five o'clock last evening. 
It will soon be five o'clock again. Will you let me show you those 
plans now? " 

Ben Griebler had surveyed Jock with the stony calm of the out- 
of-town visitor who is prepared to show surprise at nothing in 
New York. 

" There's nothing like getting an early start," said Ben Grieb- 
ler. " Come on up to my room." Key in hand, he made for the 
elevator. For an almost imperceptible moment Jock paused. Then, 
with a little rush, he followed the short, thick-set figure. " I knew 
you had it in you, McChesney. I said you looked like a comer, 
didn't I? " 

Jock said nothing. He was silent while Griebler unlocked his 



122 THE WORKER AND HIS WORK 

door, turned on the light, fumbled at the windows and shades, picked 
up the telephone receiver. " What'll you have? '^ 

" Nothing." Jock had cleared the center table and was opening 
his flat bundle of papers. He drew up two chairs. " Let's not waste 
any time," he said. " I've had a twelve-hour wait for this." He 
seemed to control the situation. Obediently Ben Griebler hung up 
the receiver, came over, and took the chair very close to Jock. 

" There's nothing artistic about gum," began Jock McChesney; 
and his manner was that of a man who is sure of himself. " It's a 
shirt-sleeve product, and it ought to be handled from a shirt-sleeve 
stand-point. Every gum concern in the country has spent thousands 
on a ' better-than-candy ' campaign before it realized that gum is a 
candy-and-drug-store article, and that no man is going to push a 
five-cent package of gum at the sacrifice of the sale of an eighty-cent 
box of candy. But the health note is there — if only you strike it 
right. Now, here's my idea " 

At six o'clock Ben Griebler, his little shrewd eyes sparkling, his 
voice more squeakily falsetto than ever, surveyed the youngster be- 
fore him with a certain awe. 

"This — this thing will actually sell our stuff in Europe! No 
gum concern has ever been able to make the stuff go outside of this 
country. Why, inside of three years every 'Arry and 'Arriet in 
England'll be chewing it on bank holidays. I don't know about 

Germany, but " He pushed back his chair and got up. " Well, 

I'm sold on that. And what I say goes. Now I'll tell you what 
I'll do, kid. I'll take youi down to St. Louis with me, at a figure 
that'll make your " 

Jock looked up. 

" Or if you don't want the Berg, Shriner crowd to get wise, 
ni fix it this way: I'll go over there this morning and tell 'em I've 
changed my mind, see? The campaign's theirs, see? Then I refuse 
to consider any of their suggestions until I , see your plan. And 
when I see it I fall for it like a ton of bricks. Old Berg'll never 
know. He's so darned high-principled " 

Jock McChesney stood up. The little drawn pinched look 
which had made his face so queerly old was gone. His eyes were 
bright. His face was flushed. 

" There! You've said it. I didn't realize how raw this deal 
was until you put it into words for me. I want to thank you. 



THE MAN WITHIN HIM 123 

You're right. Bartholomew Berg is so darned high-principled that 
two muckers like you and me, groveling around in the dirt, can't 
even see the tips of the heights to which his ideals have soared. 
Don't stop me. I know I'm talking like a book. But I feel like 
something that has just been kicked out into the sunshine after 
having been in jail." 

" You're tired," said Ben Griebler. " It's been a strain. Some- 
thing always snaps after a long tension." 

Jock's flat palm came down among the papers with a crack. 

" You bet something snaps! It has just snapped inside me." 
He began quietly to gather up the papers in an orderly little way. 

" What's that for? " inquired Griebler, coming forward. " You 
surely don't mean " 

" I mean that I'm going to go home and square this thing with 
a lady you've never met. You and she wouldn't get on, if you 
did. You don't talk the same language. Then I'm going to have a 
cold bath, and a hot breakfast. And then, Griebler, I'm going to 
take this stuff to Bartholomew Berg and tell him the whole nasty 
business. He'll see the humor of it. But I don't know whether 
he'll fire me, or make me vice-president of the company. Now, if 
you want to come over and talk to him, fair and square, why come." 

" Ten to one he fires you," remarked Griebler, as Jock reached 
the door. 

" There's only one person I know who's game enough to take 
you up on that. And it's going to take more nerve to face her at 
six-thirty than it will to tackle a whole battalion of Bartholomew 
Bergs at nine." 

" Well, I guess I can get in a three-hour sleep before — er " 

" Before what? " said Jock McChesney from the door. 

Ben Griebler laughed a little shamefaced laugh. " Before I 
see you at ten, sonny." 



A POTTER'S WHEEL 
By Eden Phillpotts 

In the course of the following week, Harvey Porter received 
permission to climb a flight of steps up which he had often cast long- 
ing glances. From the wedging-table the clay was carried straight 
to the potting-room, and now Harvey shared this work with other 
lads. He ascended, bearing a load of perfected clay, and found 
himself in a large and lofty chamber full of air and light, illuminated 
on the north and west by tall windows, and having white-washed 
walls. In the midst were ranges of open shelves to support the 
six-foot boards, and round about stood potters* wheels and turning- 
lathes. Men came and went, boys hastened hither and thither, and 
the hum of Mr. Trolley's steam-engine ascended through the open 
flooring. For two lathes and two wheels were worked by steam, the 
power controlled by the potters' and the turners' feet. But Thomas 
Body sat apart at the string-wheel, and a boy supplied the motive 
power for him. He made the large pieces, and while beside the 
younger man spread hundreds of lesser things turned by their swift 
hands from the spinning clay, on Body's board rose varied vases 
that obeyed no gauge, but budded and blossomed to his will. 

Porter was told to prepare his lump of clay for Mr. Body, and 
with a weight and scales he separated his mass into lesser masses, 
each weighing three pounds. These balls he ranged before the 
potter, and was permitted for a while to watch the magic business. 

A little shining wheel of steel stood in a basin thickly spattered 
with red mud, and beside the thrower were the few tools that he 
used — ^prickers, calipers, drill, and sponge. Within reach of his 
hand, also, were ribs of slate and tin — modeled for the inside and 
outside of the pot — and a wire with which he cut the finished piece 
from the wheel. Beside him, in the trough where his wheel spun, 
stood a bowl of water colored to redness. 

Another perpendicular wheel more than six feet high stood close 
at hand, and made Charlie Coysh, who turned it, look small. Its 
great revolution and steady progress were more fitted to master 
work than the steam-driven wheels, and it escaped their vibration. 
124 



A POTTER'S WHEEL 125 

Mr. Body sat like a king on his throne. He was red to the eyes. 
He wore a great apron, and his sleeves were turned up to the elbows. 
His hands and arms shone with wet redness; his grey beard was 
spattered. Now he threw a lump of clay, pressed it sharply on the 
eye of the wheel, and crouched and cuddled over it like a beast 
over a bone. His hands seemed to merge in the lump as he gripped 
it, and set his wrists, arms, and shoulders to the work. 

" That's called ' truing the ball,' " he explained; " but I call it 
' taming the ball.' " 

Charlie turned fast, the potter's wheel whirled, and for a moment 
the clay spluttered and fought, as it seemed, while Mr. Body, with 
his face bent near enough to catch the splashes, laughed. 

" 'Tis the last struggle to be free! " he said; " the untamed clay 
fights the potter like that, just for a moment, till he feels the grip 
grows tight on him and he knows he's met his master. But don't you 
think anybody can beat him. If you was sitting here, he'd fight and 
beat you again and again." In an instant the lump was steadied, 
dragged up to a cone, and pressed down again to a ball that every 
bubble of air might be expelled and the whole welded to an 
obedient mass. 

" Now it's tame and broken," said the potter, ^' and in go 
my thumbs." 

He began to model. 

" You see the piece in your mind's eye first and work accord- 
ing," he said. " You see it standing before you as clear as those 
vases on that board. A man like Mr. Easterbrook can build a 
model as he goes, and turns his fancies into clay as they come into 
his head; and he's told me that often and often he'll dream a pot 
finer than any that ever he's thrown and come red hot to the wheel 
to make it; but the dream's gone, and he can't turn it into a living 
pot. Now I'm building a vase." 

His thumbs were hollowing the heart of the clay, and he began 
to lift it. It rose to his touch, rounded, hollowed, billowed magically, 
expanded here to the belly of the vase, narrowed above to its neck, 
then opened again like a blossoming flower, and turned over daintily 
to make the lip. The clay revolved, fast at first, slower as the piece 
came near its finishing, for the boy at the big string-wheel watched 
its progress and worked at his handle accordingly. Body's shining 
red hands hovered, darted, turned and twisted, touched and pressed. 



126 THE WORKER AND HIS WORK 

They were never still for an instant. Round the pot and into it, 
they went, now suffering the thin clay lip to run between his fingers, 
now taking the whole palm to the face, now working within, and 
all the while slowly and subtly lifting the clay to its limits. He 
talked while he worked. 

" There's things a potter can tell, and there's things he cannot," 
he said; " and one thing that you cannot is how you know the 
clay's drawn up to its fulness, and running as thin as you dare to 
let it. To know when to stop when you're potting like this without 
gauges is an instinct; but them that don't find it come quick to them, 
will never make potters." 

The vase reached completion, and a glistening thread of light, 
fine as a gossamer, ascended on its rounded breast — the tiny rising 
of the clay between the potter's fingers. 

" 'TIS done! " said Mr. Body. Then the wheel grew still; he 
took his wire, cut the pot away, and lifted it carefully to its place 
on the board beside him. 

" 'Twill dry a while below, and then come back again to Mr. 
Godbeer," explained the old man. " Such work as this goes to him, 
and he smoothes and fines and takes my meaning with all his 
cleverness, and puts the finishing touch to the shape; but the 
master's pots never have touch of lathe upon them. He won't 
suffer it, for he hateth the lathe. It kills out the soul and spirit of 
a piece, in his opinion, and makes all pots equal — like the Socialists 
would have all men. But the paying public like for all to be suent 
and finished, and the shop-people know it. That's where Mr. Easter- 
brook's different from common men. He'd sooner see what you might 
call a great pot, even if it was faulty, than just a common every-day 
thing like these I'm making." 



The Sunday on which Porter was to serve Mr. Easterbrook 
arrived, and he reached the works an hour before the master. The 
ordeal made him anxious, but not nervous, for he knew that he 
could not fail. 

He went aloft, marked the master's clay waiting for him under 
wet cloths, and revolved the wheel once or twice to see that all was 
ready. Then an idea occurred to him, and he set about cleaning the 



A POTTER'S WHEEL 127 

trough and making the wheel brighter and smarter far than Mr. 
Easterbrook was accustomed to find it. For Thomas Body attached 
no importance to such trifles, and liked the red clay spattered about 
his work as well as his person. 

Easterbrook arrived, and he and Porter ascended to the wheel. 

George Easterbrook perceived that Harvey had been at pains 
to make all clean for him, but he did not comment on the fact. He 
allowed minor evidences of this sort to accumulate without reveal- 
ing that he had observed them; but they were recorded, not for- 
gotten. He took off his coat, turned up his sleeves, and drew on a 
great overall. Then he went to a private locker and produced 
therefrom a few of his own tools of wood and metal, with a large 
diagram. It represented the various fundamental shapes of the 
classic vase: the great rounded amphora and hydria; the narrower, 
Ufhspringing lecythus; the wide-mouthed crater and cantharus; the 
cylix, flattened to a dish; the lebes on its pedestal; the circular 
araballus; the jug-shaped oenochoe. 

" There— look at those closely," said Mr. Easterbrook. " That's 
the scale on which a potter plays his music. They include every- 
thing that can be made on a wheel. The forms slide into each 
other, and the combinations of these forms are more in number 
than the stars, because they depend upon a limitless thing; and 
that's the imagination of man." 

Harvey had taken off his coat and turned up his sleeves. Now 
he regarded the outlines without speaking. 

" In them you see almost every great, fine form that Nature can 
show you," explained the potter. " You might think that the world 
was full of beautiful outlines outside these; you might think on the 
calf of a man's leg; the turn of a girl's cheek, or the lines of a 
hunting-cat or coursing greyhound; or you might reckon there was 
greater beauty to be got by the seeing eye from the waves, or the 
cliffs, or the clouds in the sky, or the shapes of the leaves and the 
boughs; or the flame in the fire, maybe; or the smoke curling out 
of a man's pipe. You might say in your first ignorance, Harvey, 
that these pictures here are far short of the stir and bustle of living 
and moving forms that fill the earth; but you'd be wrong. The 
men that made these things saw better and keener and farther 
than any eyes that have looked out at the world since their time. 



128 THE WORKER AND HIS WORK 

They were the most reasonable beings that the world has known; 
and they let nothing escape them that was worth keeping — from 
the twist of a shell to the shoulder of a mountain. You shall read 
about them in course of time. They were called the Greeks. Mr. 
Pitts tells that he has read here and there that all Greek art is dead, 
and the spirit that made it is dead; but only very silly folk can 
hold to that. Because their discoveries about the secrets of beauty 
go to the root, and only those who think the secrets of ugliness are 
better worth finding out will say that the Greek spirit is dead. How- 
ever, to Mr. Pitts you must go if you want to learn about art." 

The boy listened; but one word in this harangue had appealed 
to him with a force greater than all the rest, and that was his own 
Christian name. Until now Easterbrook had never called him 
" Harvey." To-day he did so, the word slipping out naturally in 
the midst of his discourse. And Porter knew, from his own experi- 
ence, that one does not speak to a person by a name, if only a 
nickname, until one has often thought of the person by that name. 
He was gratified — ^indeed, mightily pleased. It seemed that the inci- 
dent drew him nearer to the master. 

Now the potter worked, while Harvey Porter responded with 
every nerve instinct alert to do himself credit. 

Even he could see; the difference between George Easterbrook's 
methods and those of Thomas Body. Here was no less reverence 
for the medium, but greater power over it. There was mystery and 
magic in this man's potting. The strength behind the delicacy was 
concealed, for the clay twined and curled, and seemed sentient and 
happy in his hands. It responded without visible cause, for Mr. 
Easterbrook's manual labors were less in evidence than Body's. 
Body appeared to be doing a difficult thing well; Easterbrook made 
a difficult thing look childishly easy. His pots seemed to ascend 
and grow like flowers off the wheel, while those of Thomas were the 
result of a process of labored building. The clay now rose and 
fell as easily as a sea-wave; it expanded, contracted, swelled, shrank, 
bellied to an amphora, spired to a narrow vase, then sank again, 
opened to a cylix or narrowed to an cenochoe. And all the time it 
seemed to breathe and palpitate until, the last touch given, the 
wheel slowed and stilled, and the stately thing born of earth and 
water stood created and ready for the ordeal of fire. 



A POTTER'S WHEEL 129 

" Life flows into it from the potter's palm and fingers," ex- 
plained the master. " The clay is ready and willing; you feel that 
it is anxious to do your bidding and make swift and faithful response; 
yet the clay preserves its own qualities for all my handiwork. 
There's great dignity in matter, you must know. It obeys in the 
measure of its power, but it imposes its own conditions on the 
potter. If the ignorant or clumsy hand asks the clay to do more 
than it is able, it refuses. It can only respond within its own 
capabilities, and we who are skilled know them, and lift the clay to 
its own highest powers of expression, as the wise father trains a 
child gently to his finest possibility." 

He worked awhile, and then spoke again. 

" There's this difference, however: a wise workman knows his 
own clay, but the wisest father doesn't know his own child, so that 
likeness breaks down." 

He proceeded, moulding his own severe sense of beauty into one 
inert mass after another. There woke, as it seemed, a close, ob- 
servant, taut sympathy between him and his material from the 
moment it began to spin and the ball was trued. A wondrous trinity 
of intellect, motion, and matter worked here together. 

Easterbrook put it differently, however. 

" There's three things go to making pots, just as there's three 
things go to making all else," he said. " And they are matter, life, 
and mind. So at least I hold, though many wiser men than me deny 
the mind. But it looks like that to my eyes, and in the business 
of potting the matter's the red mud here; the life is the spinning 
wheel; the mind is the craftsman's, who brings wheel and earth 
together and creates the pot." 

He finished eighteen pieces in the space of an hour, and when 
the work was ended he gave the boy a crumb of praise. 

" You've done all that was needful. Joanna will be jealous," 
he said. " Now fetch me clean water and a towel, and tell me which 
you like best." 

He pointed to the vases, and the boy would have given much to 
know what specially to praise. He considered, then he selected a 
bold piece of somewhat opulent and involved design. Mr. Easter- 
brook shook his head. 

" Many will think the same, and many will think wrong. When 
many people agree about a thing, they're generally wrong." 
9 



130 THE WORKER AND HIS WORK 

Then he pointed to a small and severe model some eight 
inches high. 

" That's the best," he said. 

" What wili Mr. Pitts do to it, sir? " ventured Porter. 

" He'll do nothing to it if I know him," answered the partner 
of Paul. ^'' Anyway, I hope he won't. When Mr. Pitts happens to 
be properly pleased with a pot of my making, he doesn't touch it. 
That's his way of saying ' Well done! ' to me." 



THE RIVERMAN 
By Stewart Edward White 

I FIRST met him one Fourth of July afternoon in the middle 
eighties. The sawdust streets and high board sidewalks of the 
lumber town were filled to the brim with people. The permanent 
population, dressed in the stiffness of its Sunday best, escorted 
gingham wives or sweethearts; a dozen outsiders like myself tried 
not to be too conspicuous in a city smartness; but the great multi- 
tude was composed of the men of the woods. I sat, chair-tilted, by 
the hotel, watching them pass. Their heavy woolen shirts crossed 
by the broad suspenders, the red of their sashes or leather shine of 
their belts, their short kersey trousers, " stagged " off to leave a 
gap between the knee and the heavily spiked " cork boots " — all these 
were distinctive enough of their class, but most interesting to me 
were the eyes that peered from beneath their little round hats tilted 
rakishly askew. They were all subtly alike, those eyes. Some were 
black, some were brown, or grey, or blue, but all were steady and 
unabashed, all looked straight at you with a strange humorous blend- 
ing of aggression and respect for your own business, and all without 
exception wrinkled at the corners with a suggestion of dry hmnor. 
In my half-conscious scrutiny I probably stared harder than I 
knew, for all at once a laughing pair of the blue eyes suddenly met 
mine full, and an ironical voice drawled: 

" Say, bub, you look as interested as a man killing snakes. Am 
I your long-lost friend? " 

The tone of the voice matched accurately the attitude of the 
man, and that was quite non-committal. He stood cheerfully ready 
to meet the emergency. If I sought trouble, it was here to my hand ; 
or if I needed help, he was willing to offer it. 

" I guess you are," I replied, " if you can tell me what all this 
outfit's headed for." 

He thrust back his hat and ran his hand through a mop of 
closely cropped light curls. 

" Birling match," he explained brieflv. " Come on." 

I joined him, and together we followed the crowd to the river, 

131 



132 THE WORKER AND HIS WORK 

where we roosted like cormorants on adjacent piles overlooking a 
patch of clear water among the filled booms. 

" Drive's just over," my new friend informed me. " Rear come 
down last night. Fourther July celebration. This little town will 
scratch fer th' tall timber along about midnight when the boys goes 
in to take her apart." 

A half-dozen men with peavies rolled a white-pine log of about 
a foot and a half diameter into the clear water, where it lay rocking 
back and forth, three or four feet from the boom piles. Suddenly 
a man ran the length of the boom, leaped easily into the air, and 
landed with both feet square on one end of the floating log. That 
end disappeared in an ankle-deep swirl of white foam, the other rose 
suddenly, the whole timber, projected forward by the shock, drove 
headlong to the middle of the little pond. And the man, his arms 
folded, his knees just bent in the graceful, nervous attitude of the 
circus-rider, stood upright like a statue of bronze. 

A roar approved this feat. 

"That's Dickey Darrell," said my informant; "Roaring Dick. 
Watch him." 

The man on the log was small, with clean beautiful haunches and 
shoulders, but with hanging baboon arms. Perhaps his most striking 
feature was a mop of reddish-brown hair that overshadowed a little 
triangular white face accented by two reddish-brown quadrilaterals 
that served as eyebrows and a pair of inscrutable chipmunk eyes. 

For a moment he poised erect in the great calm of the public 
performer. Then slowly he began to revolve the log under his 
feet. The lofty gaze, the folded arms, the straight supple waist 
budged not by a hair's breadth; only the feet stepped forward, at 
first deliberately, then faster and faster, until the rolling log threw 
a blue spray a foot into the air. Then suddenly slap! slap I the heavy 
caulks stamped a reversal. The log came instantaneously to rest, 
quivering exactly like some animal that had been spurred through 
its paces. 

" Magnificent! " I cried. 

" That's nothing! " my companion repressed me; " anybody can 
birl a log. Watch this." 

Roaring Dick for the first time unfolded his arms. With some 
appearance of caution he balanced his unstable footing into absolute 
immobility. Then he turned a somersault. 



THE RIVERMAN 133 

This was the real thing. My friend uttered a wild yell of 
applause which was lost in a general roar. 

A long pike-pole shot out, bit the end of the timber, and towed 
it to the boom pile. Another man stepped on the log with Darrell. 
They stood facing each other, bent-kneed, alert. Suddenly with 
one accord they commenced to birl the log from left to right. The 
pace grew hot. Like squirrels treading a cage their feet twinkled. 
Then it became apparent that Darrell's opponent was gradually 
being forced from the top of the log. He could not keep up. Little 
by little, still moving desperately, he dropped back to the slant, then 
at last to the edge, and so off into the river with a mighty splash. 

" Clean birled! " commented my friend. 

One after another a half-dozen rivermen tackled the imperturb- 
able Dick, but none of them possessed the agility to stay on top in 
the pace he set them. One boy of eighteen seemed for a moment to 
hold his own, and managed at least to keep out of the water even 
when Darrell had apparently reached his maximum speed. But 
that expert merely threw his entire weight into two reversing stamps 
of his feet, and the young fellow drove forward as abruptly as 
though he had been shied over a horse's head. 

The crowd was by now getting uproarious and impatient of 
volunteer effort to humble Darrell's challenge. It wanted the best, 
and at once. It began, with increasing insistence, to shout a name. 

"Jimmy Powers! " it vociferated; "Jimmy Powers." 

And then by shamefaced bashfulness, by profane protest, by 
muttered and comprehensive curses, I knew that my companion on 
the other pile was indicated. 

A dozen men near at hand began to shout. " Here he is! " they 
cried. " Come on, Jimmy." " Don't be a high banker." " Hang his 
hide on the fence." 

Jimmy, still red and swearing, suffered himself to be pulled from 
his elevation and disappeared in the throng. A moment later I 
caught his head and shoulders pushing toward the boom piles, and 
so in a moment he stepped warily aboard to face his antagonist. 

This was evidently no question to be determined by the sim- 
plicity of force or the simplicity of a child's trick. The two men 
stood half-crouched, face to face, watching each other narrowly, 
but making no move. To me they seemed like two wrestlers sparring 
for an opening. Slowly the log revolved one way; then slowly the 



154 THE WORKER AND HIS WORK 

other. It was a mere courtesy of salute. All at once Dick birled 
three rapid strokes from left to right, as though about to roll the 
log, leaped into the air and landed square with both feet on the 
other slant of the timber. Jimmy Powers felt the jar, and acknowl- 
edged it by the spasmodic jerk with which he counterbalanced 
Darrell's weight. But he was not thrown. 

As though this daring and hazardous manoeuver had opened the 
combat, both men sprang to life. Sometimes the log rolled one way, 
sometimes the other, sometimes it jerked from side to side like a 
crazy thing, but always with the rapidity of light, always in a 
smother of spray and foam. The decided spat, spat, spat of the 
reversing blows from the caulked boots sounded like picket firing. I 
could not make out the different leads, feints, parries, and counters 
of this strange method of boxing, nor could I distinguish to whose 
initiative the various evolutions of that log could be ascribed. But 
I retain still a vivid mental picture of two men nearly motionless 
above the waist, nearly vibrant below it, dominating the insane 
gyrations of a stick of pine. 

The crowd was appreciative and partisan — for Jimmy Powers. 
It howled wildly, and rose thereby to ever higher excitement. Then 
it forgot its manners utterly and groaned when it made out that a 
sudden splash represented its favorite, while the indomitable Darrell 
still trod the quarter-deck as champion birler for the year. 

I must confess I was as sorry as anybody. I climbed down from 
my cormorant roost, and picked my way between the alleys of 
aromatic piled lumber in order to avoid the press, and cursed the 
little gods heartily for undue partiality in the wrong direction. In 
this manner I happened on Jimmy Powers himself seated dripping 
on a board and examining his bared foot. 

"I'm sorry," said I behind him. " How did he do it? " 

He whirled, and I could see that his laughing boyish face had 
become suddenly grim and stern, and that his eyes were shot 
with blood. 

" Oh, it's you, is it? " he growled disparagingly. " Well, that's 
how he did it.'* 

He held out his foot. Across the instep and at the base of the 
toes ran two rows of tiny round punctures from which the blood 
was oozing. I looked very inquiring. 

" He corked me! " Jimmy Powers explained. " Jammed his 



THE RIVERMAN 135 



spikes into me! Stepped on my foot and tripped me, the " 

Jimmy Powers certainly could swear. 

" Why didn't you make a kick? " I cried. 

" That ain't how I do it," he muttered, pulling on his heavy 
woolen sock. 

" But no," I insisted, my indignation mounting. '^ It's an out- 
rage! That crowd was with you. All you had to do was to 
say something " 

He cut me short. " And give myself away as a fool — sure Mike. 
I ought to know Dicky Darrell by this time, and I ought to be big 
enough to take care of myself." He stamped his foot into his driver's 
shoe and took me by the arm, his good humor apparently restored. 
" No, don't you lose any hair, bub; I'll get even with Roaring Dick." 

That night, having by the advice of the proprietor moved my 
bureau and trunk against the bedroom door, I lay wide awake listening 
to the taking of the town apart. At each especially vicious crash 
I wondered if that might be Jimmy Powers getting even with 
Roaring Dick. 

The following year, but earlier in the season, I again visited my 
little lumber town. In striking contrast to the life of that other 
mid-summer day were the deserted streets. The landlord knew me, 
and after I had washed and eaten, approached me with a suggestion. 

" You got all day in front of you," said he; " why don't you 
take a horse and buggy and make a visit to the big jam? Every- 
body's up there more or less." 

In response to my inquiry, he replied: 

*' They've jammed at the upper bend, jammed bad. The crew's 
been picking at her for near a week now, and last night Darrell was 
down to see about some more dynamite. It's worth seein'. The 
breast of her is near thirty foot high, and lots of water in the river." 

" Darrell? " said I, catching at the name. 

" Yes. He's rear boss this year. Do you think you'd like to 
take a look at her? " 

" I think I should," I assented. 

The horse and I jogged slowly along a deep sand road, through 
wastes of pine stumps and belts of hardwood beautiful with the 
early spring, until finally we arrived at a clearing in which stood two 
huge tents, a mammoth kettle slung over a fire of logs, and drying 
racks about the timbers of another fire. A fat cook in the inevitable 



136 THE WORKER AND HIS WORK 

battered derby hat, two bare-armed cookees, and a chore " boy " of 
seventy-odd summers were the only human beings in sight. One 
of the cookees agreed to keep an eye on my hqrse. I picked my 
way down a well-worn trail toward the regular clank, clank, click 
of the peavies. 

I emerged finally to a plateau elevated some fifty or sixty feet 
above the river. A half-dozen spectators were already gathered. 
Among them I could not but notice a tall, spare, broad-shouldered 
young fellow dressed in a quiet business suit, somewhat wrinkled, 
whose square, strong, clean-cut face and muscular hands were tanned 
by the weather to a dark umber-brown. In another moment I 
looked down on the jam. 

The breast, as my landlord had told me, rose sheer from the water 
to the height of at least twenty-five feet, bristling and formidable. 
Back of it pressed the volume of logs packed closely in an apparently 
inextricable tangle as far as the eye could reach. A man near in- 
formed me that the tail was a good three miles up stream. From 
beneath this wonderful chevaux de frise foamed the current of the 
river, irresistible to any force less mighty than the statics of 
such a mass. 

A crew of forty or fifty men were at work. They clamped their 
peavies to the reluctant timbers, heaved, pushed, slid, and rolled 
them one by one into the current, where they were caught and 
borne' away. They had been doing this for a week. As yet their 
efforts had made but slight impression on the bulk of the jam, but 
some time, with patience, they would reach the key-logs. Then 
the tangle would melt like sugar in the freshet, and these imperturb- 
able workers would have to escape suddenly over the plunging 
logs to shore. 

My eye ranged over the men, and finally rested on Dickey Dar- 
rell. He was standing on the slanting end of an upheaved log 
dominating the scene. His little triangular face with the accents of 
the quadrilateral eyebrows was pale with the blaze of his energy, 
and his chipmunk eyes seemed to flame with a dynamic vehemence 
that caused those on whom their glance fell to jump as though they 
had been touched with a hot poker. I had heard more of Dickey 
Darrell since my last visit, and was glad of the chance to observe 
Morrison & Daly's best " driver " at work. 

The jam seemed on the very edge of breaking. After half an 



THE RIVERMAN 137 

hour^s strained expectation it seemed still on the very edge of break- 
ing. So I sat down on a stump. Then for the first time I noticed 
another acquaintance, handling his peavie near the very person 
of the rear boss. 

" Hullo," said I to myself; " that's funny. I wonder if Jimmy 
Pawers got even; and if so, why he is working so amicably and so 
near Roaring Dick." 

At noon the men came ashore for dinner. I paid a quarter into 
the cook's private exchequer and so was fed. After the meal I 
approached my acquaintance of the year before. 

" Hello, Powers," I greeted him; " I suppose you don't remem- 
ber me? " 

" Sure," he responded heartily. " Ain't you a little early 
this year? " 

" No," I disclaimed, " this is a better sight than a birling match." 

I offered him a cigar, which he immediately substituted for his 
corncob pipe. We sat at the root of a tree. 

" It'll be a great sight when that jam pulls," said I. 

" You bet," he replied, " but she's a teaser. Even old Tim 
Shearer would have a picnic to make out just where the key-logs 
are. We've started her three times, but she's plugged tight every 
trip. Likely to pull almost any time." 

We discussed various topics. Finally I ventured: 

" I see your old friend Darrell is rear boss." 

" Yes," said Jimmy Powers, dryly. 

" By the way, did you fellows ever square up on that 
birling match? " 

" No," said Jimmy Powers; then after an instant, " Not yet.'* 

I glanced at him to recognize the square set to the jaw that had 
impressed me so formidably the year before. And again his face 
relaxed almost quizzically as he caught sight of mine. 

" Bub," said he, getting to his feet, " those little marks are on 
my foot yet. And just you tie into one idea: Dickey Darrell's got 
it coming." His face darkened with a swift anger. I glimpsed the 
flare of an undying hate. 

About three o'clock that afternoon Jimmy's prediction was ful- 
filled. Without the slightest warning the jam " pulled." Usually 
certain premonitory cracks^ certain sinkings down, groanings for- 
ward, grumblings, shruggings, and sullen, reluctant shif tings of the 



138 THE WORKER AND HIS WORK 

logs give opportunity for the men to assure their safety. This jam, 
after inexplicably hanging fire for a week, as inexplicably started 
like a sprinter almost into its full gait. The first few tiers toppled 
smash into the current, raising a waterspout like that made by a 
dynamite explosion ; the mass behind plunged forward blindly, rising 
and falling as the integral logs were up-ended, turned over, thrust 
one side, or forced bodily into the air by the mighty power playing 
jack-straws with them. 

The rivermen, though caught unaware, reached either bank. 
They held their peavies across their bodies as balancing-poles, and 
zig-zagged ashore with a calmness and lack of haste that were in 
reality only an indication of the keenness with which they fore-esti- 
mated each chance. Long experience with the ways of saw-logs 
brought them out. They knew the correlation of these many forces 
just as the expert billiard-player knows instinctively the various 
angles of incidence and reflection between his cue-ball and its mark. 
Consequently, they avoided the centers of eruption, paused on the 
spots steadied for the moment, dodged moving logs, trod those not yet 
under way, and so arrived on solid ground. The jam itself started 
with every indication of meaning business, gained momentum for a 
hundred feet, and then plugged to a standstill. The " break " 
was abortive. 

Now we all had leisure to notice two things. First, the movement 
had not been of the whole jam, as we had at first supposed, but only 
of a block or section of it twenty rods or so in extent. Thus between 
the part that had moved and the greater bulk that had not stirred 
lay a hundred feet of open water in which floated a number of loose 
logs. The second fact was that Dickey Darrell had fallen into that 
open stretch of water and was in the act of swimming toward one of 
the floating logs. That much we were given just time to appreciate 
thoroughly. Then the other section of the jam rumbled and began 
to break. Roaring Dick was caught between two gigantic mill- 
stones moving to crush him out of sight. 

An active figure darted down the tail of the first section, out over 
the floating logs, seized Darrell by the coat-collar, and so burdened 
began desperately to scale the very face of the breaking jam. 

Never was a more magnificent rescue. The logs were rolling, 
falling, diving against the laden man. He climbed as over a tread- 
mill, a treadmill whose speed was constantly increasing. And when 



THE RIVERMAN 139 

he finally gained the top, it was as the gap closed splintering beneath 
him and the man he had saved. 

It is not in the woodsman to be demonstrative at any time, but 
here was work demanding attention. Without a pause for breath 
or congratulation they turned to the necessity of the moment. The 
jam, the whole jam, was moying at last. Jimmy Powers ran ashore 
for his peavie. Roaring Dick, like a demon incarnate, threw himself 
into the work. Forty men attacked the jam at a dozen places, 
encouraging the movement, twisting aside the timbers that threat- 
ened to lock anew, directing pigmy-like the titanic forces into the 
channel of their efficiency. Roaring like wild cattle the logs swept 
by, at first slowly, then with the railroad rush of the curbed freshet. 
Men were everywhere, taking chances, like cowboys before the 
stampeded herd. And so, out of sight aro.und the lower bend swept 
the front of the jam in a swirl of glory, the rivermen riding the great 
boom back of the creature they subdued, until at last, with the 
slackening current, the logs floated by free, cannoning with hollow 
sound one against the other. A half-dozen watchers, leaning 
statuesquely on the shafts of their peavies, watched the ordered 
ranks pass by. 

One by one the spectators departed. At last only myself and the 
brown-faced young man remained. He sat on a stump, staring with 
sightless eyes into vacancy. I did not disturb his thoughts. 

The sun dipped. A cool breeze of evening sucked up the river. 
Over near the cook-camp a big fire commenced to crackle by the 
drying frames. At dusk the rivermen straggled in from the down- 
river trail. 

The brown-faced yoimg man arose and went to meet them. I 
saw him return in close conversation with Jimmy Powers. Before 
they reached us he had turned away with a gesture of farewell. 

Jimmy Powers stood looking after him long after his form had 
disappeared, and indeed even after the sound of his wheels had 
died toward town. As I approached, the riverman turned to me a 
face from which the reckless, contained self-reliance of the woods- 
worker had faded. It was wide eyed with an almost awe-stricken 
wonder and adoration. 

" Do you know who that is? " he asked me in a hushed voice. 
" That's Thorpe, Harry Thorpe. And do you know what he said to 
me just now, me? He told me he wanted me to work in Camp One 



140 THE WORKER AND HIS WORK 

next winter, Thorpe's One. And he told me I was the first man he 
ever hired straight into One." 

His breath caught with something like a sob. 

I had heard of the man and of his methods. I knew he had made 
it a practice of recruiting for his prize camp only from the employees 
of his other camps, that, as Jimmy said, he never " hired straight into 
One." I had heard, too, of his reputation among his own and other 
woodsmen. But this was the first time I had ever come into per- 
sonal contact with his influence. It impressed me the more in that 
I had come to know Jimmy Powers and his kind. 

" You deserve it, every bit," said I. " I'm not going to call you 
a hero, because that would make you tired. What you did this after- 
noon showed nerve. It was a brave act. But it was a better act 
because you rescued your enemy, because you forgot everything but 
your common humanity when danger " 

I broke off. Jimmy was again looking at me with his ironically 
quizzical grin. 

" Bub," said he, " if you're going to hang any stars of Bethlehem 
on my Christmas tree, just call a halt right here. I didn't rescue that 
scalawag because I had any Christian sentiments, nary bit. I was 
just naturally savin' him for the birling match next Fourther July." 



THE TOLL OF BIG TIMBER 

By Bertrand William Sinclair 

Day came again, in the natural sequence of events. Matt, the 
cook, roused all the camp at six o'clock with a tremendous banging 
on a piece of boiler-plate hung by a wire. Long before that Stella 
heard her brother Charlie astir. She wondered sleepily at his 
sprightliness, for as she remembered him at home he had been a 
confirmed lie-abed. She herself responded none too quickly to the 
breakfast gong, as a result of which slowness the crew had filed 
away to the day's work, her brother striding in the lead, when she 
entered the mess-house. 

She killed time with partial success till noon. Several times she 
was startled to momentary attention by the prolonged series of 
sharp cracks which heralded the thunderous crash of a falling tree. 
There were other sounds which betokened the loggers' activity in 
the near-by forest — the ringing whine of saw blades, the dull stroke 
of the axe, voices calling distantly. 

She tried to interest herself in the camp and the beach and ended 
up by sitting on a log in a shady spot, staring dreamily over the 
lake. She thought impatiently of that homely saw concerning Satan 
and idle hands, but she reflected also that in this isolation even 
mischief was comparatively impossible. There was not a soul to 
hold speech with except the cook, and he was too busy to talk, even 
if he had not been afflicted with a painful degree of diffidence when 
she addressed him. She could make no effort at settling down, at 
arranging things in what was to be her home. There was nothing to 
arrange, no odds and ends wherewith almost any woman can conjure 
up a homelike effect in the barest sort of place. She beheld the noon 
return of the crew much as a shipwrecked castaway on a desert 
shore might behold a rescuing sail, and she told Charlie that she 
intended to go into the woods that afternoon and watch them work. 

" All right,'^ said he. " Just so you don't get in the way of a 
falling tree." 

A narrow fringe of brush and scrubby timber separated the camp 
from the actual work. From the water's edge to the donkey engine 

141 



142 THE WORKER AND HIS WORK 

was barely four hundred yards. From donkey to a ten-foot jump-off 
on the lake shore in a straight line on a five per cent, gradient ran a 
curious roadway, made by placing two logs in the hollow scooped 
by tearing great timbers over the soft earth, and a bigger log on each 
side. Butt to butt and side to side, the outer sticks half their thick- 
ness above the inner, they formed a continuous trough, the bottom 
and sides worn smooth with friction of sliding timbers. Stella had 
crossed it the previous evening and wondered what it was. Now, 
watching them at work, she saw. Also she saw why the great stumps 
that rose in every clearing in this land of massive trees were sawed 
six and eight feet above the ground. Always at the base the firs 
swelled sharply. Wherefore the falling gangs lifted themselves above 
the enlargement to make their cut. 

Two sawyers attacked a tree. First, with their dQuble-bitted 
axes, each drove a deep notch into the sapwood just wide enough to 
take the end of a two-by-six plank four or five feet long with a single 
grab-nail in the end — the springboard of the Pacific coast logger, 
whose daily business lies among the biggest timber on God's foot- 
stool. Each then clambered up on his precarious perch, took hold 
of his end of the long, limber saw, and cut in to a depth of a foot or 
more, according to the size of the tree. Then jointly they chopped 
down to this sawed line, and there was the undercut complete, a deep 
notch on the side to which the tree would fall. That done, they 
swung the ends of their springboards, or if it were a thick trunk, 
made new holding notches on the other side, and the long saw would 
cut steadily through the heart of the tree toward that yellow, gashed 
undercut, stroke upon stroke, ringing with a thin, metallic twang. 
Presently there would arise an ominous cracldng. High in the air 
the tall crest would dip slowly, as if it bowed with manifest reluctance 
to the inevitable. The sawyers would drop lightly from their 
springboards, crying: 

"Tim-ber-r-r-r! " 

The earthward sweep of the upper boughs would hasten till the 
air was full of a whistling, whishing sound. Then came the rending 
crash as the great tree smashed prone, crushing what small timber 
stood in its path, followed by the earth-quivering shock of its impact 
with the soil. The tree once down, the fallers went on to another. 
Immediately the swampers fell upon the prone trunk with axes, 
denuding it of limbs; the buckers followed them to saw it into 



THE TOLL OF BIG TIMBER 143 

lengths decreed by the boss logger. When the job was done, the 
brown fir was no longer a stately tree but saw-logs, each with a 
square butt that lay donkeyward, trimmed a trifle rounding with 
the axe. 

Benton worked with one falling gang. The falling gang raced 
to keep ahead of the buckers and swampers, and they in turn raced to 
keep ahead of the hook tender, rigging slinger, and donkey, which 
last trio moved the logs from woods to water, once they were down 
and trimmed. Terrible, devastating forces of destruction they seemed 
to Stella Benton, wholly unused as she was to any woodland save 
the well-kept parks and little areas of groomed forest in her native 
state. All about in the ravaged woods lay the big logs, scores of them. 
They had only begun to pull with the donkey a week earlier, Benton 
explained to her. With this size gang he could not keep a donkey 
engine working steadily. So they had felled and trimmed to a good 
start, and now the falling crew and the swampers and buckers were 
in a ding-dong contest to see how long they could keep ahead of 
the puffing Seattle yarder. 

Stella sat on a stump, watching. Over an area of many acres 
the ground was a litter of broken limbs, ragged tops, crushed and 
bent and broken younger growth, twisted awry by the big trees in 
their fall. Huge stumps upthrust like beacons in a ruffled harbor, 
grim, massive butts.. From all the ravaged wood rose a pungent 
smell of pitch and sap, a resinous, pleasant smell. Radiating like the 
spokes of a wheel from the head of the chute ran deep, raw gashes 
in the earth, where the donkey had hauled up the Brobdingnagian 
logs on the end of an inch cable. 

" This is no small boy's play, is it, Stell? " Charlie said to her 
once in passing. 

And she agreed that it was not. Agreed more emphatically and 
with half-awed wonder when she saw the donkey puff and quiver 
on its anchor cable, as the hauling line spooled up on the drum. 
On the outer end of that line snaked a sixty-foot stick, five feet 
across the butt, but it came down to the chute head, brushing earth 
and brush and small trees aside as if they were naught. Once the 
big log caromed against a stump. The rearward end flipped ten 
feet in the air and thirty feet sidewise. But it came clear and slid 
with incredible swiftness to the head of the chute, flinging aside 
showers of dirt and small stones, and leaving one more deep furrow 



144 THE WORKER AND HIS WORK 

in the forest floor. Benton trotted behind it. Once it came to rest 
well in the chute, he unhooked the line, freed the choker (the short- 
noosed loop of cable that slips over the log's end), and the haul-back 
cable hurried the main line back to another log. Benton followed, 
and again the donkey shuddered on its foundation skids till another 
log lay in the chute, with its end butted against that which lay 
before. One log after another was hauled down till half a dozen 
rested there, elongated peas in a wooden pod. 

Then a last big stick came with a rush, bunted these others 
powerfully so that they began to slide with the momentum thus im- 
parted, slowly at first, then, gathering way and speed, they shot 
down to the lake and plunged to the water over the ten-foot jump-off 
like a school of breaching whales. 

All this took time, vastly more time than it takes in the telling. 
The logs were ponderous masses. They had to be manoeuvered 
sometimes between stumps and standing timber, jerked this way and 
that to bring them into the clear. 

By four o'clock Benton and his rigging slinger had just finished 
bunting their second batch of logs down the chute. Stella watched 
these Titanic labors with a growing interest and a dawning vision 
of why these men walked the earth with that reckless swing of their 
shoulders. For they were palpably masters in their environment. 
They strove with woodsy giants and laid them low. Amid constant 
dangers they sweated at a task that shamed the seven labors of 
Hercules. Gladiators they were in a contest from which they did 
not always emerge victorious. 

When Benton and his helper followed the haul-back line away 
to the domain of the falling gang the last time, Stella had so far 
unbent as to strike up conversation with the donkey engineer. That 
greasy individual finished stoking his fire-box and replied to her 
first comment. 

" Work? You bet," said he. "It's real graft, this is. I got the 
easy end of it, and mine's no snap. I miss a signal, big stick butts 
against something solid; biff! goes the line and maybe cuts a man 
plumb in two. You got to be wide awake when you run a loggin* 
donkey. These woods is no place for a man, anyway j if he ain't spry 
both in his head and feet." 

" Do many men get hurt logging? " Stella asked. " It looks 
awfully dangerous, with these big trees falling and smashing every- 
thing. Look at that. Goodness! " 



THE TOLL OF BIG TIMBER 145 

From the donkey they could see a shower of ragged splinters and 
broken limbs fly when a two-hundred-foot fir smashed a dead cedar 
that stood in the way of its downward swoop. They could hear the 
pieces strike against brush and trees like the patter of shot on a 
tin wall. 

The donkey engineer gazed calmly enough. 

" Them flyin' chunks raise the dickens sometimes,'^ he observed. 
" Oh, yes, now an' then a man gets laid out. There's some things 
you got to take a chance on. Maybe you get cut with an axe, or a 
limb drops on you, or you get in the way of a breakin' line — though 
a man ain't got any business in the bight of a line. A man don't 
stand much show when the end of a inch'n' a quarter cable snaps at 
him like a whiplash. I seen a feller on Howe Sound cut square in two 
with a cable-end once. A broken block's the worst, though! That 
generally gets the riggin' slinger, but a piece of it's liable to hit 
anybody. You see them big iron pulley blocks the haul-back cable 
works in? Well, sometimes they have to anchor a snatch block to 
a stump an' run the main line through it at an angle to get a log out 
the way you want. Suppose the block breaks when I'm givin' it to 
her? Chunks of that broken cast iron'll fly like bullets. Yes, sir, 
broken blocks is bad business. Maybe you noticed the boys used 
the snatch block two or three times this afternoon? We've been 
lucky in this camp all spring. Nobody so much as nicked himself 
with an axe. Breaks in the gear don't come very often, anyway, 
with an outfit in first-class shape. We got good gear an' a good crew 
— about as skookum a bunch as I ever saw in the woods." 

Two hundred yards distant Charlie Benton rose on a stump and 
semaphored with his arms. The engineer whistled answer and stood 
to his levers; the main line began to spool slowly in on the drum. 
Another signal, and he shut off. Another signal, after a brief wait, 
and the drum rolled faster, the line tautened like a fiddlestring, and 
the ponderous machine vibrated with the strain of its effort. 

Suddenly the line came slack. Stella, watching for the log to 
appear, saw her brother leap backward off the stump, saw the cable 
whip sidewise, mowing down a clump of saplings that stood in the 
bight of the line, before the engineer could shut off the power. In 
that return of comparative silence there rose above the sibilant hiss of 
the blow-off valve a sudden commotion of voices. 

The donkey engineer peered over the brush. " That don't sound 
good. I guess somebody got it in the neck.'^ 
10 



146 THE WORKER AND HIS WORK 

Almost immediately Sam Davis and two other men came running. 

" What's up? " the engineer called as they passed on a dog trot. 

" Block broke," Davis answered over his shoulder. " Piece of 
it near took a leg off Jim Renfrew." 

Stella stood for a moment, hesitating. 

" I may be able to do something. I'll go and see," she said. 

" Better not," the engineer warned. " Liable to run into some- 
thing that'll about turn your stomach. What was I tellin' about a 
broken block? Them ragged pieces of flyin^ iron sure mess a man up. 
They'll bring a bed spring, an' pack him down to the boat, an' get 
him to a doctor quick as they can. That's all. You couldn't 
do nothin'." 

Nevertheless she went. Renfrew was the rigging slinger working 
with Charlie, a big, blond man who blushed like a schoolboy when 
Benton introduced him to her. Twenty minutes before he had gone 
trotting after the haul-block, sound and hearty, laughing at some 
sally of her brother's. It seemed a trifle incredible that he should 
lie mangled and bleeding among the green forest growth, while his 
fellow^s hurried for a stretcher. 

Two hundred yards at right angles from where Charlie had stood 
giving signals she found a little group under a branchy cedar. Ren- 
frew lay on his back, mercifully unconscious. Benton squatted beside 
him, twisting a silk handkerchief with a stick tightly above the 
w^ound. His hands and Renfrew's clothing and the mossy ground 
were smeared with blood. Stella looked over his shoulder. The 
overalls were cut away. In the thick of the man's thigh stood a 
ragged gash she could have laid both hands in. She drew back. 

Benton looked up. 

" Better keep away," he advised shortly. " We've done all that 
can be done." 

She retreated a little and sat down on a root half-sickened. The 
other two men stood up. Benton sat back, his first-aid work done, 
and rolled a cigarette with fingers that shook a little. Off to one 
side she saw the fallers climb up on their springboards. Presently 
arose the ringing whine of the thin steel blade, the chuck of axes 
where the swampers attacked a fallen tree. No matter, she thought, 
that injury came to one, that death might hover near, the work went 
on apace, like action on a battle-field. 



COTTON AND THE OLD SOUTH 
By James A. B. Scherer 

Robert Fulton, a friend of both Whitney and Cartwright, by- 
applying the steam-engine of Watt to override the immense ocean 
barrier dividing the gin from the home of the power-loom, manifolded 
a thousand times over the carrying power of the ships; while 
Samuel Slater, the British spinner, by setting up from memory at 
Pawtucket a successful factory just three years before Whitney 
invented his gin, initiated in New England a demand for Southern 
cotton second only to that of the old England from which he had fled. 
It is little wonder that the South devoted itself thenceforward with 
undivided attention to the production of that precious commodity 
for which two continents clamored, and which the South alone 
could supply. 

Certainly the life of the South from this time forward revolved 
around the cotton plant. Early in the spring the negroes with their 
multitudinous mules begin the plowing of straight, long, deep fur- 
rows in the fragrant mellow soil — the deeper the better, since cotton 
has a tap-root which, if properly invited, will sink four feet in 
searching for fresh food and moisture. Fertilizer, consisting of 
manure and malodorous guano, or, in later times, expensive phos- 
phates, is laid in the center of the beds thrown up by the furrows; 
and the time of actual planting awaited. When first the song of the 
" turtle dove " is heard, and the starry blooms of the dogwood light 
up the edge of the forest, and the frosts are thought to be over, come, 
in the old days, flocks of black women v/ith hoes, scooping out the 
beds at rough intervals, followed by other women dropping careless 
handfuls of seed. The tender green plants, thrusting their way 
upward shortly, were thinned out, one stalk to a foot. When two or 
three weeks above the surface, more plowing was needful, to break 
the new crust of the soil, and kill weeds. Then, every three weeks 
thereafter, until the steaming " dog days " again of August, the 
patient plow would break the crust again and again, so that on the 
larger plantations the plows never ceased, but turned continually 
from the last furrows of far-stretching acres to break the first furrows 

147 



148 THE WORKER AND HIS WORK 

of another three weeks' task. Hoeing, meanwhile, kept the women 
busy with the grass and weeds. In early August the crop was " laid 
by," and required no more work till picking time. 

Meanwhile, under proper conditions this incessant labor would 
transform the fields into flower gardens. By June the beautiful blos- 
soms are blushing; bell-shaped and softly brilliant, here and there, 
with the magic trick of changing their colors, as a maid her clothes. 
Shimmering in the morning in a creamy white or pale straw dress, 
and closing its silky petals in the evening, the flower on the second 
day of its fragile life shifts to a wild-rose color, deepening by evening 
to magenta or carnation: all this, for three brief but brilliant days, 
on graceful stems knee-high, rich in glossy dark green foliage ; so that 
the aspect of a spacious level field, with fresh blossoms budding into 
cream or cloth of gold, while elder sisters smile in pink and red 
amidst the trembling verdure, is of a splendid variegated beauty that 
lends to the Southern landscape half its charm. It is in this summer 
season the Southern children sing: 

First day white, next day red, 
Third day from my birth I'm dead ; 
Though I am of short duration, 
Yet withal I clothe the nation. 

From mid-August until winter, however, and especially in that 
" season of mellow fruitfulness,'' October, the cotton shrub becomes 
a thing of wonder; adding to its garniture of bloom the bursting 
pods of snowy fleece that dominate the coloring of the fields into the 
semblance of a vegetative snowstorm. Then, on the old plantation, 
swarmed forth pickaninnies and black babes in arms, with bags and 
huge baskets and mirth, nimble fingers, as it were, predestined to the 
cotton pod, to live in the sunshine amid the fleecy snow, and pile 
up white fluffy mounds at the furrows' ends, chanting melodies, 
minor chords of song as old as Africa; the women troop home again 
at nightfall with poised overflowing baskets on their heads, to 
feasts of corn-pone and cracklin' and molasses in the blaze of a 
light'ood fire, within sound of the thrumming of the banjo. 

Cotton was and is the Southern " money crop." From autumn 
the banker and merchant " carry " the South on their ledgers, and 
scant is the interchange of coin; but when the " first bale of cotton " 
rolls into town behind a jangling team of trotting mules, their grin- 



COTTON AND THE OLD SOUTH 149 

ning driver cracking out resounding triumph with his whip, money 
makes its anniversary appearance, accounts are settled, and the 
whole shining South " feels Flush.'^ The gin-houses drive a roaring 
business, the air is heavy in them and the light is thick with downy 
lint, and their atmosphere pungent with the oily odor of crushed 
woolly seeds. Steam or hydraulic presses, with irresistible power, 
then pack towering heaps of seedless fleece into coarse casings of 
flimsy jute wrapping, metal-bound. These bales, weighing roughly 
to the tale of five hundred pounds, pass the appraisement of the 
broker, swarm the platforms of the railway warehouses and over- 
flow to the hospitable ground; then are laden laboriously into freight 
cars, and, after being squeezed to the irreducible minimum of size 
by some giant compress, are hauled to the corners of the earth. 

Of the distinctive civilization of the old Southern cotton life no 
words could be more pertinent than Grady's. 

" That was a pecuHar society," he said. " Almost feudal in its 
splendor, it was almost patriarchal in its simplicity. Leisure and 
wealth gave it exquisite culture. Its wives and mothers, exempt from 
drudgery and almost from care, gave to their sons, through patient 
and constant training, something of their own grace and gentleness, 
and to their homes beauty and light. Its people, homogeneous by 
necessity, held straight and simple faith, and were religious to a 
marked degree along the old lines of Christian belief. The same 
homogeneity bred a hospitality that was as kinsmen to kinsmen, 
and wasted at the threshold of every home what the more frugal 
people of the North conserved and invested in public charities. 
Money counted least in making the social status and constantly 
ambitious and brilliant youngsters from no estate married into 
families of planter princes. Meanwhile, the one character utterly 
condemned and ostracized was the man who was mean to his slaves. 
Even the coward was pitied and might have been liked. For the 
cruel master there was no toleration. 

" In its engaging grace — ^in the chivalry that tempered even 
Quixotism with dignity — in the piety that saved master and slave 
aHke — in the charity that boasted not — in the honor held above estate 
— in the hospitality that neither condescended nor cringed — in frank- 
ness and heartiness and wholesome comradeship — in the reverence 
paid to womanhood and the inviolable respect in which woman's 



ISO THE WORKER AND HIS WORK 

name was held — the civilization of the old slave regime in the South 
has not been surpassed, and perhaps will not be equaled, among men." 
During the season between the two cotton crops, " Southern hos- 
pitality " touches its climax. With leisure and money at command, 
the " big house " of the old plantation threw wide its welcoming doors 
across the fields, or stalked the deer amid the swamps, or hunted the 
wild duck and turkey and whistling coveys of quail (called pa'tridges) 
while the women spread the damask in the evening, and laid out the 
family silver to grace a savory feast that has no counterpart in all 
the world: fried chicken and corn pone and yams, possum, and the 
esoteric dainties of the freshly slaughtered pig, heaps of snowy, steam- 
ing, home-grown rice, slices of delicate peanut-fed ham, teased with 
the contrasting exquisite flavors of quince and crab-apple jellies, 
watermelon " preserves," " cookies " and tarts and spiced 
brandy peaches! 




L ABREUVOIR. BY CONSTANTIN MEUNIER 



THE COTTON-PICKER 

By Carl Holliday 

Behold, amid the rows of gleaming white, 
The heedless negro sings, and stoops to pluck 
The fleecy boll. Beneath the glaring light 
Of Southern skies, all thoughtless of the luck 
That lifts or fells earth's kingdoms and her men, 
He onward goes across the far-stretched fields. 
And sings and bends and sings and bends again, 
Heaping the fluffy load. Oh, power that wields! 
What might this common worker of the soil 
Who grapples with the silent dust for bread 
Doth hold within those fingers! Stooped with toil, 
With every bend he spins a mighty thread 
That reaching forth doth hold the waiting earth 
In bonds as strong as is her common dearth. 



From The Cotton Picker attd Other Poems, by Carl Holliday. Copy- 
right, 1907, by The Neale Publishing Co. 

151 



AN APIARY 
By Maurice Maeterlinck 

I HAVE not yet forgotten the first apiary I saw. It was many years 
ago, in a large village of Dutch Flanders, the sweet and pleasant 
country whose love for brilliant color rivals that of Zealand even, the 
concave mirror of Holland; a country that gladly spreads out before 
us, as so many pretty, thoughtful toys, her illuminated gables, and 
waggons, and towers; her cupboards and clocks that gleam at the end 
of the passage; her little trees marshalled in line along quays and 
canal-banks, waiting, one almost might think, for some quiet, benefi- 
cent ceremony; her boats and her barges with sculptured poops, her 
flower-like doors and windows, immaculate dams, and elaborate many- 
colored drawbridges; and her little varnished houses, bright as new 
pottery, from which bell-shaped dames come forth, all a-glitter with 
silver and gold, to milk the cows in the whitehedged fields, or spread 
the linen on flowery lawns, cut into patterns of oval or lozenge, and 
most astoundingly green. 

To this spot, a sort of aged philosopher had retired. His hap- 
piness lay all in the beauties of his garden; and best-loved and visited 
most often, was the apiary, composed of twelve domes of straw, some 
of which he had painted a bright pink, and some a clear yellow, but 
most of all a tender blue. 

These hives stood against the wall of the house, in the angle 
formed by one of those pleasant and graceful Dutch kitchens whose 
earthenware dresser, all bright with copper and tin, reflected itself 
through the open door on to the peaceful canal. And the water led 
one's eyes to a calm horizon of mills and of meadows. 

Here, as in all places, the hives lent a new meaning to the 
flowers and the silence, the balm of the air and the rays of the sun. 



152 



SAP-TIME 

A NEW JONATHAN STORY 

By Elisabeth Woodbridge 

It was a little tree-toad that began it. In a careless moment he 
had come down to the bench that connects the big maple tree with 
the old locust stump, and when I went out at dusk to wait for 
Jonathan, there he sat, in plain sight. A few experimental pokes sent 
him back to the tree, and I studied him there, marveling at the way 
he assimilated with its bark. As Jonathan came across the grass I 
called softly, and pointed to the tree. 

" Well? " he said. 

" Don't you see? '' 

" No. What? " 

" Look — I thought you had eyesl " 

" Oh, what a little beauty! " 

" And isn't his back just like bark and lichens I And what are 
those things in the tree beside him? " 

" Plugs, I suppose." 

" Plugs? " 

" Yes. After tapping. Uncle Ben used to tap these trees, 
I believe." 

" You mean for sap? Maple syrup? " 

" Yes." . 

" Jonathan! I didn't know these were sugar maples." 

" Oh, yes. These on the road." 

" The whole row? Why, there are ten or fifteen of them! And 
you never told me! " 

" I thought you knew." 

" Knew! I don't know anything — I should think you^d know 
that, by this time. Do you suppose, if I had known, I should have 
let all these years go by — oh, dear — think of all the fun weVe missed! 
And syrup! " 

" You'd have to come up in February." 

" Well, then, I'll come in February. Who's afraid of February? " 

153 



154 THE WORKER AND HIS WORK 

"All right. Try it next year." 

I did. But not in February. Things happened, as things do, and 
it was early April before I gqt to the farm. But it had been a 
wintry March, and the farmers told me that the sap had not been 
running except for a few days in a February thaw. Anjrway, it was 
worth trying. 

Jonathan could not come with me. He was to join me later. 
But Hiram found a bundle of elder spouts in the attic, and with 
these and an auger we went out along the snowy, muddy road. The 
hole was bored — a pair of them — in the first tree, and the spouts 
driven in. I knelt, watching — in fact, peering up the spout-hole to see 
what might happen. Suddenly a drop, dim with sawdust, appeared 
— ^gathered, hesitated, then ran down gayly and leapt off the end. 
" Look! Hiram! It's running! " I called. 

Hiram, boring the next tree, made no response. He evidently 
expected it to run. Jonathan would have acted just like that, too, I 
felt sure. Is it a masculine quality, I wonder, to be unmoved when 
the theoretically expected becomes actual? Or is it that some tem- 
peraments have naturally a certain large confidence in the sway of 
law, and refuse to wonder at its individual workings? To me the 
individual workings give an ever fresh thrill because they bring a new 
realization of the mighty powers behind them. It seems to depend 
on which end you begin at. 

But though the little drops thrilled me, I was not beyond setting 
a pail underneath to catch them. And as Hiram went on boring, I 
followed with my pails. Pails, did I say? Pails by courtesy. There 
were, indeed, a few real pails — berry-pails, lard-pails, and water- 
pails — but for the most part the sap fell into pitchers, or tin sauce- 
pans, stew-kettles of aluminum or agate ware, blue and gray and 
white and mottled, or big yellow earthenware bowls. It was a strange 
collection of receptacles that lined the roadside when we had finished 
our progress. As I looked along the row, I laughed, and even 
Hiram smiled. 

But what next? Every utensil in the house was out here, sitting 
in the road. There was nothing left but the wash-boiler. No.w, I 
had heard tales of amateur syrup-boilings, and I felt that the wash- 
boiler would not do. Besides, I meant to work outdoors — no kitchen 
stove for me! I must have a pan, a big, flat pan. I flew to the tele- 
phone, and called up the village plumber, three miles away. Could 



SAP-TIME 155 

he build me a pan? Oh, say, two feet by three feet, and five inches 
high — ^yes, right away. Yes, Hiram would call for it in the afternoon. 

I felt better. And now for a fireplace! Oh, Jonathan! Why 
did you have to be away! For Jonathan loves a stone and knows 
how to put stones together, as witness the stone " Eyrie " and the 
stile in the lane. However, there Jonathan wasn't. So I went out 
into the swampy orchard behind the house and looked about — no 
lack of stones, at any rate. I began to collect material, and Hiram, 
seeing my purpose, helped with the big stones. Somehow my fire- 
place got made — two side walls, one end wall, the other end left open 
for stoking. It was not as pretty as if Jonathan had done it, but 
" ^twas enough, 'twould serve." I collected firewood, and there I was, 
ready for my pan, and the afternoon was yet young, and the sap 
was drip-drip-dripping from all the spouts. I could begin to boil 
next day. I felt that I was being borne along on the providential 
wave that so often floats the inexperienced to success. 

That night I emptied all my vessels into the boiler and set them 
out once more. A neighbor drove by and pulled up to comment 
benevolently on my work. 

" Will it run to-night? " I asked him. 

" No — ^no — 'twon't run to-night. Too cold. 'Twon't run any 
to-night. You can sleep all right." 

This was pleasant to hear. There was a moon, to be sure, but it 
was growing colder, and at the idea of crawling along that road in 
the middle of the night even my enthusiasm shivered a little. 

So I made my rounds at nine, in the white moonlight, and went 
to sleep. 

I was awakened the next morning to a consciousness of flooding 
sunshine and Hiram's voice outside my window. 

" Got anything I can empty sap into? I've got everything all 
filled up." 

" Sap! Why, it isn't running yet, is it? " 

" Pails were flowin' over when I came out.'' 

" Flowing over! They said the sap wouldn't run last night." 

" I guess there don't nobody know when sap '11 run and when it 
won't," said Hiram peacefully, as he tramped off to the barn. 

In a few minutes I was outdoors. Sure enough, Hiram had every- 
thing full — old boilers, feed-pails, water-pails. But we found some 
three-gallon milk cans and used them. A farm is like a city. There 



156 THE WORKER AND HIS WORK 

are always things enough in it for all purposes. It is only a question 
of using its resources. 

Then, in the clear April sunshine, I went out and surveyed the 
row of maples. How they did drip! Some of them almost ran. I 
felt as if I had turned on the faucets of the universe and didn^t 
know how to turn them off again. 

However, there was my new pan. I set it over my oven walls and 
began to pour in sap. Hiram helped me. He seemed to think he 
needed his feed-pails. We poured in sap and we poured in sap. 
Never did I see anything hold so much as that pan. Even Hiram 
was stirred out of his usual calm to remark, " It beat all, how much 
that holds." Of course,, Jonathan would have had its capacity all 
calculated the day before, but my methods are empirical, and so I 
was surprised as well as pleased when all my receptacles emptied them- 
selves into its shallow breadths and still there was a good inch 
to allow for boiling up. Yes, Providence — my exclusive little fool's 
Providence — was with me. The pan, and the oven, were a success, 
and when Jonathan came that night I led him out with unconcealed 
pride and showed him the pan — now a heaving, frothing mass of 
sap-about- to-be-syrup, sending clouds of white steam down the wind. 
As he looked at the oven walls, I fancied his fingers ached to get at 
them, but he offered no criticism, seeing that they worked. 

The next day began overcast, but Providence was merely pre- 
paring for me a special little gift in the form of a miniature snow- 
storm. It was quite real while it lasted. It whitened the grass and 
the road, it piled itself softly among the clusters of swelling buds on 
the apple trees, and made the orchard look as though it had burst into 
bloom in an hour. Then the sun came out, there were a few dazzling 
moments when the world was all blue and silver, and then the 
whiteness faded. 

And the sap! How it dripped! Once an hour I had to make 
the rounds, bringing back gallons each time, and the fire under my 
pan was kept up so that the boiling down might keep pace with 
the new supply. 

" They do say snow makes it run," shouted a passer-by, and 
another called, " You want to keep skimmin'! " Whereupon I seized 
my long-handled skimmer and fell to work. Southern Connecticut 
does not know much about syrup, but by the avenue of the road I 
was gradually accumulating such wisdom as it possessed. 



SAP-TIME 157 

The syrup was made. No worse accident befell than the occa- 
sional overflowing of a pail too long neglected. The syrup was made, 
and bottled, and distributed to friends, and was the pride of the 
household through the year. 

" This time I will go early," I said to Jonathan; " they say the 
late running is never quite so good." 

It was early March when I got up there this time — early March 
after a winter whose rigor had known practically no break. Again 
Jonathan could not come, but cousin Janet could, and we met at the 
little station, where Hiram was waiting with Kit and the surrey. The 
sun was warm, but the air was keen and the woods hardly showed 
spring at all yet, even in that first token of it, the slight thickening 
of their millions of little tips, through the swelling of the buds. The 
city trees already showed this, but the country ones still kept their 
wintry penciling of vanishing lines. 

Spring was in the road, however. " There ain't no bottom to this 
road now, it's just dropped clean out," remarked a fellow-teamster 
as we wallowed along companionably through the woods. But, some- 
how, we reached the farm. Again we bored our holes, and again I 
was thrilled as the first bright drops slipped out and jeweled the ends 
of the spouts. I watched Janet. She was interested but calm, class- 
ing herself at once with Hiram and Jonathan. We unearthed last 
year's oven and dug out its inner depths — ^leaves and dirt and apples 
and ashes — it was like excavating through the seven Troys to get to 
bottom. We brought down the big pan, now clothed in the honors 
of a season's use, and cleaned off the cobwebs incident to a year's 
sojourn in the attic. By sunset we had a panful of syrup boiling 
merrily and already taking on a distinctly golden tinge. We tasted 
it. It was very syrupy. Letting the fire die down, we went in to 
get supper in the utmost content of spirit. 

" It's so much simpler than last year," I said, as we sat over our 
cozy " tea," " having the pan and the oven ready-made, and all " 

" You don't suppose anything could happen to it while we're 
in here? " suggested Janet. " Sha'n't I just run out and see? " 

" No, sit still. What could happen? The fire's going out." 

" Yes, I know." But her voice was uncertain. 

" You see, I've been all through it once," I reassured her. 

As we rose, Janet said, " Let's go out before we do the dishes." 



158 THE WORKER AND HIS WORK 

And to humor her I agreed. We lighted the lantern and stepped out 
on the back porch. It was quite dark, and as we looked off toward 
the fireplace we saw gleams of red. 

" How funny! " I murmured. " I didn't think there was so 
much fire left." 

We felt our way over, through the yielding mud of the orchard, 
and as I raised the lantern we stared in dazed astonishment. The 
, pan was a blackened mass, lit up by winking red eyes of fire. I held 
the lantern more closely. I seized a stick and poked — the crisp black 
stuff broke and crumbled into an empty and blackening pan. A 
curious odor arose. 

" It couldn't have! " gasped Janet. 

" It couldn't— but it has! " I said. 

It was a matter for tears, or rage, or laughter. And laughter 
won. When we recovered a little we took up the black shell of car- 
bon that had once been syrup-froth; we laid it gently beside the 
oven, for a keepsake. Then we poured water in the pan, and steam 
rose hissing to the stars. 

" Does it leak? " faltered Janet. 

"Leak! " I said. I was on my knees now, watching the water 
stream through the parted seam of the pan bottom, down into the 
ashes below. 

" The question is," I went on as I got up, " did it boil away 
because it leaked, or did it leak because it boiled away?" 

" I don't see that it matters much," said Janet. She was showing 
symptoms of depression at this point. 

" It matters a great deal," I said. " Because, you see, we've 
got to tell Jonathan, and it makes all the difference how we put it." 

"I see," said Janet; then she added, experimentally, "Why 
tell Jonathan? " 

" Why, Janet, you know better! I wouldn't miss telling Jonathan 
for anything. What is Jonathan jor! " 

" Well — of course," she conceded. " Let's do dishes." 

We sat before the fire that evening and I read while Janet knitted. 
Between my eyes and the printed page there kept rising a vision — ■ 
a vision of black crust, with \vinking red embers smoldering along its 
broken edges. I found it distracting in the extreme. . . . 

At some time unknown, out of the blind depths of the night, I 
was awakened by a voice: 



SAP-TIME 159 

" It's beginning to rain. I think I'll just go out and empty what's 
near the house." 

" Janet! " I murmured, " don't be absurd." 

" But it will dilute all that sap." 

" There isn't any sap to dilute. It won't be running at night." 
After awhile the voice, full of propitiatory intonations, resumed: 

" My dear, you don't mind if I slip out. It will only take 
a minute." 

" I do mind. Go to sleep! " Silence. Then: 

" It's raining harder. I hate to think of all that sap- 



" You don't have to think! " I was quite savage. " Just go to 
sleep — and let me! " Another silence. Then a fresh downpour. 
The voice was pleading: 

^^ Please let me gol I'll be back in a minute. And it's not cold." 

" Oh, well — I'm awake now, anyway. I'll go." My voice was 
tinged with that high resignation that is worse than anger. Janet's 
tone changed instantly: 

"No, no! Don't. Please don't! I'm going. I truly don't mind." 

" I'm going. I don't mind, either, not at all." 

" Oh, dear! Then let's not either of us go." 

" That was my idea in the first place." 

" Well, then, we won't. Go to sleep, and I will, too." 

" Not at all ! I've decided to go." 

" But it's stopped raining. Probably it won't rain any more." 

" Then what are you making all this fuss for? " 

" I didn't make a fuss. I just thought I could slip out " 

" Well, you couldn't. And it's raining very hard again. And 
I'm going." 

" Oh, don't! You'll get drenched." 

" Of course. But I can't bear to have all that sap diluted." 

" It doesn't run at night. You said it didn't." 

" You said it did." 

" But I don't really know. You know best." 

" Why didn't you think of that sooner? Anyway, I'm going." 

" Oh, dear! You make me feel as if I'd stirred you up " 

" You have," I interrupted, sweetly. " I won't deny that you 
have stirred me up. But now that you have mentioned it " — I felt 
for a match — " now that you have mentioned it, I see that this was 



160 THE WORKER AND HIS WORK 

the one thing needed to make my evening complete, or perhaps it's 
morning — I don't know." 

We found the dining-room warm, and soon we were equipped in 
those curious compromises of vesture that people adopt under such 
circumstances, and, with lantern and umbrella, we fumbled our way- 
out to the trees. The rain was driving in sheets, and we plodded up 
the road in the yellow circle of lantern-light wavering uncertainly 
over the puddles, while under our feet the mud gave and sucked. 

" It's diluted, sure enough," I said, as we emptied the pails. We 
crawled slowly back, with our heavy milk-can and sap-and-rain- 
water, and went in. 

The warm dining-room was pleasant to return to, and we sat down 
to cookies and milk, feeling almost cozy. 

" IVe always wanted to know how it would be to go out in the 
middle of the night this way," I remarked, " and now I know." 

" Aren't you hateful! " said Janet. 

" Not at all. Just appreciative. But now, if you haven't any 
other plan, we'll go back to bed." 

It was half-past eight when we waked next morning. But there 
was nothing to wake up for. The old house was filled with the rain- 
noises that only such an old house knows. On the little windows 
the drops pricked sharply; in the fireplace with the straight flue they 
fell, hissing, on the embers. On the porch roofs the rain made a dull 
patter of sound; on the tin roof of the " little attic " over the kitchen 
it beat with flat resonance. In the big attic, when we went up to 
see if all was tight, it filled the place with a multitudinous clamor; 
on the sides of the house it drove with a fury that re-echoed dimly 
within doors. 

Outside, everything was afloat. We visited the trees and viewed 
with consternation the torrents of rain water pouring into the pails. 
We tried fastening pans over the spouts to protect them. The wind 
blew them merrily down the road. It would have been easy enough to 
cover the pails, but how to let the sap drip in and the rain drip out — 
that was the question. 

" It seems as if there was a curse on the syrup this year," 
said Janet. 

" The trouble is," I said, ^' I know just enough to have lost my 
hold on the fool's Providence, and not enough really to take care 
of myself." 



SAP-TIME 161 

" Superstition! " said Janet. 

" What do you call your idea of the curse? " I retorted. " Any- 
way, I have an idea! Look, Janet! We'll just cut up these enamel- 
cloth table-covers here by the sink and everywhere, and tack them 
around the spouts." 

Janet's thrifty spirit was doubtful. " Don't you need them? " 

" Not half so much as the trees do. Come on! Pull them off. 
We'll have to have fresh ones this summer, anyway." 

We stripped the kitchen tables and the pantry and the milk- 
room. We got tacks and a hammer and scissors, and out we went 
again. We cut a piece for each tree, just enough to go over each pair 
of spouts and protect the pail. When tacked on, it had the appear- 
ance of a neat bib, and as the pattern was a blue and white check, 
the effect as one looked down the road at the twelve trees, was very 
fresh and pleasing. It seemed to cheer the people who drove by, too. 

But the bibs served their purpose, and the sap dripped cozily into 
the pails without any distraction from alien elements. Sap doesn't 
run in the rain, they say, but this sap did. Probably Hiram was 
right, and you can't tell. I am glad if you can't. The physical 
mysteries of the universe are being unveiled so swiftly that one likes 
to find something that still keeps its secret — though, indeed, the 
spiritual mysteries seem in no danger of such enforcement. 

The next day the rain stopped, the floods began to subside, and 
Jonathan managed to arrive, though the roads had even less " bottom 
to 'em " than before. The sun blazed out, and the sap ran faster, 
and, after Jonathan had fully enjoyed them, the blue and white bibs 
were taken off. Somehow in the clear March sunshine they looked 
almost shocking. By the next day we had syrup enough to try 
for sugar. 

For on sugar my heart was set. Syrup was all very well for the 
first year, but now it had to be sugar. Moreover, as I explained to 
Janet, when it came to sugar, being absolutely ignorant, I was again 
in a position to expect the aid of the fool's Providence. 

" How much do you know about it? " asked Janet. 

" Oh, just what people say. It seems to be partly like fudge and 
partly like molasses candy. You boil it, and then you beat it, and 
then you pour it off." 

" IVe got more to go on than that," said Jonathan. " I came 
up on the train with the Judge. He used to see it done." 



162 THE WORKER AND HIS WORK 

" You've got to drive Janet over to her train to-night; Hiram 
can't," I said. 

" All right. There's time enough." 

We sat down to early supper, and took turns running out to the 
kitchen to " try " the syrup as it boiled down. At least we said we 
would take turns, but usually we all three went. Supper seemed 
distinctly a side issue. 

" I'm going to take it off now," said Jonathan. " Look out! " 

^' Do you think it's time? " I demurred. 

" We'll know soon," said Jonathan, with his usual composure. 

We hung over him. " Now you beat it," I said. But he was 
already beating. 

" Get some cold water to set it in," he commanded. We brought 
the dishpan with water from the well, where ice still floated. 

" Maybe you oughtn't to stir so much — do you think? " I sug- 
gested, helpfully. " Beat it more — up, you know." 

" More the way you would eggs," said Janet. 

"I'll show you." I lunged at the spoon. 

" Go away! This ain't eggs," said Jonathan, beating steadily. 

" Your arm must be tired. Let me take it," pleaded Janet. 

" No, me! " I said. " Janet, you've got to get your coat and 
things. You'll have to start in fifteen minutes. Here, Jonathan, 
you need a fresh arm." 

"I'm fresh enough." 

" And I really don't think you have the motion." 

" I have motion enough. This is my job. You go and help Janet." 

" Janet's all right." 

" So am I. See how white it's getting. The Judge said " 

" Here comes Hiram and Kit," announced Janet, returning with 
bag and wraps. " But you have ten minutes. Can't I help? " 

" He won't let us. He's that ' sot,' " I murmured. " He'll make 
you miss your train." 

" You could butter the pans," Jonathan counter-charged, " and 
you haven't." 

We flew to prepare, and the pouring began. It was a thrilling 
moment. The syrup, or sugar, now a pale hay color, poured out 
thickly, blob-blob-blob, into the little pans. Janet moved them up 
as they were needed, and I snatched the spoon, at last, and encour- 
aged the stuff to fall where it should. But Jonathan got it from me 



SAP-TIME 163 

again, and scraped out the remnant, making designs of clovers and 
polliwogs on the tops of the cakes. Then a dash for coats and hats 
and a rush to the carriage. 

When the surrey disappeared aroimd the turn of the road, I 
went back, shivering, to the house. It seemed very empty, as houses 
will, being sensitive things. I went to the kitchen. There on the 
table sat a huddle of little pans, to cheer me, and I fell to work 
getting things in order to be left in the morning. Then I went back 
to the fire and waited for Jonathan. I picked up a book and tried 
to read, but the stillness of the house was too importunate. It had to 
be listened to; and I leaned back and watched the fire, and the old 
house and I held communion together. 

Perhaps in no other way is it possible to get quite what I got 
that evening. It was partly my own attitude. I was going away 
in the morning, and I had, in a sense, no duties toward the place. 
The magazines of last fall lay on the tables, the newspapers of last 
fall lay beside them. The dust of last fall was, doubtless, in the 
closets and on the floors. It did not matter. For though I was the 
mistress of the house, I was for the moment even more its guest, and 
guests do not concern themselves with such things as these. 

If it had been really an empty house, I should have been obliged 
to think of these things, for in an empty house the dust speal?:s and the 
house is still, dumbly imprisoned in its own past. On the other 
hand, when a house is filled with life, it is still, too; it is absorbed in 
its own present. But when one sojourns in a house that is merely 
resting, full of life that has only for a brief season left it, ready 
for the life that is soon to return — then one is in the midst of silences 
that are not empty and hollow, but richly eloquent. The house is 
the link that joins and interprets the living past and the living future. 

Something of this I came to feel as I sat there in the wonderful 
stillness. There were no house noises such as generally form the 
unnoticed background of one's consciousness — the steps overhead, 
the distant voices, the ticking of the clock, the breathing of the dog 
in the corner. Even the mice and the chimney-swallows had not 
come back, and I missed the scurrying in the walls and the flutter 
of wings in the chimney. The fire purred low, now and then the wind 
sighed gently about the corner of the " new part," and a loose door- 
latch clicked as the draught shook it. A branch drew back and forth 
across a window-pane with the faintest squeak. And little by little 



164 THE WORKER AND HIS WORK 

the old old house opened its heart. All that it told me I hardly 
yet know myself. It gathered up for me all its past, the past that I 
had known and the past that I had not known. Time fell away. My 
own importance dwindled. I seemed a very small part of the life of 
the house^ — very small, yet wholly belonging to it. I felt that it 
absorbed me as it had absorbed the rest — those before and after me 
— for time was not. 

There was the sound of slow wheels outside, the long roll of the 
carriage-house door, and the trampling of hoofs on the flooring within. 
Then the clinking of the lantern and the even tread of feet on the 
path behind the house, a gust of raw snow-air — and the house fell 
silent so that Jonathan might come in. 

" Your sugar is hardening nice, I see," he said, rubbing his hands 
before the fire. 

" Yes," I said. " You know I told Janet that for this part of 
the affair we could trust to the fool's Providence." 

" Thank you," said Jonathan. 




MTNEUR AU TRAVAIL. BY CONSTANTIN MEUXIER 



THE RED COW AND HER FRIENDS 
By Peter McArthur 

i. the gobbler 

. There are times when I wish that I had a proper scientific educa- 
tion. For instance, I would like to know just now whether turkey 
gobblers ever suffer from speaker's sore throat. None of the bulletins 
I have on hand throws any light on the matter. It would cheer me 
considerably to learn that gobblers occasionally suffer from aphonia 
or speechlessness. It sometimes seems to me that our bubblyjock is 
getting hoarse, though he is still able to gobble with vigor and author- 
ity. But unless he loses his voice before long I shall have to wring 
his neck — no easy job — or do without my usual amount of sleep. The 
trouble is all due to the fact that when the turkey hen tried to hide her 
nest she selected a bunch of long grass at the foot of a tree not far 
from the house. As she had been put off the cluck a couple of times 
to make her lay the proper amount of eggs, it was decided to let her 
keep this nest. When she finally got broody she was given seventeen 
eggs and allowed to settle down to the task of incubating Christmas 
dinners. As far as she was concerned this was all right, for she is a 
modest, quiet bird, whose presence would never be noticed. But this 
is not the case with her lordly spouse. Every morning at about a 
quarter to four he comes down from his perch on the ridge-pole of 
the stable and struts down to see if his lady has passed a comfortable 
night. As the grass is long and wet with dew he comes to the lawn 
and sends her his morning greetings, and I can tell you that a 
forty-pound gobbler can let out a very considerable amount of 
noise. He gets right under my window and explodes into- assorted 
sounds. Once a minute, or oftener, he lets out a gobble, until I get up 
and throw a shoe or a hairbrush at him. Then I go back to bed and 
try to sleep until it is time to get up. If there is any way of treating 
his vocal cords so as to stop this morning charicari I wish some 
scientist would write and tell me about it. 

From The Red Cow and Her Friends, by Peter McArthur. Copyright, 
by John Lane Company, Publishers. 

165 



166 THE WORKER AND HIS WORK 

II. HIS TROUBLES 

Last night when we were milking there was a sudden racket on 
the roof of the cow-stable that scared the cows so that they stopped 
giving down. You would think that a man with a wooden leg was 
having a fit on the shingles right over our heads. The pounding, 
flopping, and scratching on the hollow roof made the stable resound 
like the big drum in an Orange parade. I couldn't imagine what on 
earth was happening, but it only took a step to get outdoors and 
then the cause of the trouble was plain. The old turkey gobbler 
had decided to roost on the ridgeboard of the stable and he was 
having the time of his life getting up the roof. He was using his 
wings and his tail to balance himself as he clawed for a toe-hold, 
and he showed none of the stately gracefulness that marks his move- 
ments when he is strutting around the barnyard and proclaiming his 
overlordship. When he reached the ridge and caught his balance 
with a final flip-flap of his broad tail he stretched his neck and 
looked around to see if any of the young gobblers were grinning at 
him. They were already quietly at roost with the mother hen at the 
far end of the roof, and the noisy approach of their lord and king 
made them huddle together in squeaking terror. Seeing that their 
attitude was respectful he settled down on his wishbone for the night. 
Being young and light they had flown gracefully to their chosen roost 
and doubtless could not understand what was ailing him when he 
sprawled around like that. I could sympathize with him better than 
they could, for when a man gets heavy and gets chalky deposits in 
his joints the climbing stunts he did as a boy become impossible. 
Time was when I could have walked up that roof as jauntily as if 
I were on parade on an asphalt sidewalk, but I suspect that if I 
tried it now I would make more noise than the old gobbler. 

III. HUMAN NATURE IN DUMB CREATURES 

It is a mistake to suppose that any quality, habit, trick, failing, 
weakness, virtue or other characteristic is peculiar to mankind. The 
dumb creatures about the place have every one of them. If I were 
to watch them carefully I feel sure that I could find instances of 
everything from the Seven Deadly Sins to the Seven Cardinal Vir- 
tues, and that without leaving the barnyard. It is all very well for 
us to talk about getting rid of our animal natures as if that would 



THE RED COW AND HER FRIENDS 167 

mark an upward step in our development, but what interests me is 
how to rid the dumb creatures of what can only be described as their 
human natures. It is always the human things they do that arouse 
my wrath or make me laugh. For instance, our old gobbler gives 
every evening one of the most human exhibitions of over-bearing 
meanness that I have ever witnessed. I thought it was only society 
people, and a particularly annoying brand of them at that, who had 
the habit of waiting until other people were comfortably seated at 
a concert or theatre and then w^alking in, distiu-bing every one and 
perhaps making quite a few get up to make way for them as they 
progressed toward their seats. I thought this trick was confined to 
people who wished to show their importance and new clothes, and 
didn't mind how much they bothered other people. But since watch- 
ing our gobbler going to roost I have come to the conclusion that 
this kind of conduct on the part of society people at public enter- 
tainments is not due to vanity or a desire to show off but to funda- 
mental cussedness and a wicked delight in causing as much dis- 
comfort as possible to other people. 

The old gobbler has become expert at ascending the roof of the 
stable and not only does the trick with ease but puts frills on it. 
When roosting time comes round each evening, the mother hen and 
her flock of young gobblers and hens go to roost quietly and cir- 
cumspectly like ordinary folks. The old gobbler, on the contrary, 
waits around and picks up grains of oats about the stacks and himts 
for crickets and keeps up an air of being busy until it is almost dark 
and the rest of his tribe are settled for the night — or think they are. 
When he finally makes up his mind that it is bedtime he stretches his 
neck a few times, first in one direction and then in another, and 
takes a look at the top of the stable with one eye and then with the 
other and at last makes a flying leap or a leaping fly that lands him 
on the ridge-board. That would be all right if he were satisfied 
after he got there, but he is not. He insists on roosting on the extreme 
north end of the ridge-board and he always flies up on the south 
end. There is no reason why he should not fly up at the north 
end, but he never does it, and I am inclined to think from watching his 
actions that he flies up on the south end on purpose. Anyway, as 
soon as he gets up and gets his balance he starts to walk towards 
the north along the ridge-board. As soon as he comes to the first 
of his offspring he gives a sharp peck with his bill and the youngster 



168 THE WORKER AND HIS WORK 

gets up squeaking and moves along ahead of him. Presently he has 
them all huddled on the ridge-board along the north end and the fun 
begins. The polite thing for him to do would be to step down on 
the shingles and walk around them, but does he do it? I should 
say not. He gives the nearest youngster a vicious peck that makes 
him jump in the air and land sprawling a few feet down on the 
shingles. In rapid succession he deals with the fourteen youngsters 
and their mother in the same way and for a few minutes the roof is 
covered with squeaking, sprawling, protesting turkeys. As he pecks 
them out of his way he walks along the ridge-board to his chosen 
roosting-place and when he finally reaches it he stretches his neck 
arrogantly while the others scramble back to the top and settle 
down for the night. When they have settled down the old bully 
settles down also with as much dignity as a dowager who had dis- 
turbed a whole seatful of music lovers at a concert or opera. You 
needn't tell me that there isn't something human about a gobbler 
that does such things as that. 

IV. COVi^ CHARACTER 

It is when a fellow settles down to do the chores twice a day 
and every day that he gets thoroughly acquainted with his livestock. 
When the cattle are in the pasture field they look pleasant and pose 
for their pictures when people come along with cameras, but when 
they are put in stalls and waited on hand and — I mean foot and 
mouth, they develop all sorts of little meannesses — ^just like human 
beings. One little cow starts to shake her head until her horns are 
simply a dangerous blur every time I go to loosen her chain to let 
her out to water. I have had several narrow escapes from being 
prodded, but it is useless to yell at her, or even to use the whip 
on her. She will start shaking her head as soon as I lay my hand 
on the chain, and she keeps it up until the chain drops from her 
neck. Another brute has the habit of swinging quickly towards me as 
soon as she feels the chain loosen, and I have to side-step like a 
prize-fighter to get out of the way of her horns. But I am glad to 
record that the Red Cow, variously known as Calamity and Fence- 
viewer I, can be untied safely, even by a child. When the chain is 
opened she backs quietly from the stall and walks to the stable door 
in a dignified manner — unless there happens to be a pail standing 
around where she can poke an investigating nose into it. She is 



THE RED COW AND HER FRIENDS 169 

always on the lookout for something to eat, and she always enjoys 
it better if it is something she should not have. 

V. CALF EXUBERANCE 

Last night Juno got loose, and for a few minutes there was ex- 
citement around the stable. Juno is a fall calf, daughter of Fence- 
viewer II, and owing to the scarcity of stable room she is being pam- 
pered and fed up for veal. At the time of her arrival the children 
named her Jupiter, but on second thought it was considered that 
Juno would be more appropriate. Up to last night she had lived in a 
small calf pen at the end of the stable, but the fastening on the gate 
came loose and she discovered what her legs were for. She shot 
out through the stable door in a way that sent the hens flying over 
the haystacks. Then she tripped over a sheaf of cornstalks that I 
had dropped on the ground while preparing to feed the cows, sprawled 
at full length, bounced right up and rushed ahead until she was 
brought to a standstill by a wire fence in a way that almost tele- 
scoped her neck into her body. Finding that the wire fence would not 
yield, she said " Bah-wah " and started in another direction. Sheppy 
was coming around the corner of the granary in his most sedate 
manner, when the pop-eyed avalanche almost stepped on him. When 
last seen Sheppy was plunging blindly between two haystacks with 
his tail between his legs. A flock of hens that were enjoying their 
evening bran mash next attracted her attention, and she made an 
offensive straight at them. When they were thoroughly scattered she 
rushed the ducks from a mud puddle, and the squawking they made 
startled her so that she applied the brakes and threw on the reverse. 
It was a wonderful exhibition of vitality, and showed what a milk 
diet can do for one. The next I heard of Juno was when I was 
stooping over to pick up a sheaf of cornstalks, and if you can picture 
to yourself a dignified man in that attitude with a lusty calf prancing 
behind him and going through the motions of getting ready to bunt 
you can understand the joyous laughter with which the children 
shouted a warning. I sidestepped in the nick of time and shooed 
Juno away to the orchard, where she could enjoy herself without 
getting into trouble. After the chores were done I took a pail that 
was as empty as a political platform and she followed me right back 
into the pen just like an intelligent voter. I could do a little moral- 
izing right here, but it is not considered good form to talk politics 
just now. 



THE LAST THRESHING IN THE COULEE 

By Hamlin Garland 

Life on a Wisconsin farm, even for the women, had its compen- 
sations. There were times when the daily routine of lonely and 
monotonous housework gave place to an agreeable bustle, and human 
intercourse lightened the toil. In the midst of the slow progress 
of the fall's plowing, the gathering of the threshing crew was a most 
dramatic event to my mother, as to us, for it not only brought un- 
wonted clamor, it fetched her brothers, William and David and 
Frank, who owned and ran a threshing machine, and their coming 
gave the house an air of festivity which offset the burden of extra 
work which fell upon us all. 

I recall with especial clearness the events of that last threshing 
in the coulee — I was eight, my brother was six. For days we had 
looked forward to the coming of " the threshers," listening with the 
greatest eagerness to father's report of the crew. At last he said, 
" Well, Belle, get ready. The machine will be here to-morrow." 

All day we hung on the gate, gazing down the road, watching, 
waiting for the crew, and even after supper, we stood at the windows 
still hoping to hear the rattle of the ponderous separator. 

Father explained that the men usually worked all day at one 
farm and moved after dark, and we were just starting to " climb the 
wooden hill " when we heard a far-off faint halloo. 

" There they are," shouted father, catching up his old square 
tin lantern and hurriedly lighting the candle within it. " That's 
Frank's voice." 

The night air was sharp, and as we had taken off our boots we 
could only stand at the window and watch father as he piloted the 
teamsters through the gate. The light threw fantastic shadows here 
and there, now lighting up a face, now bringing out the separator 
which seemed a weary and sullen monster awaiting its den. The 
men's voices sounded loud in the still night, causing the roused 
turkeys in the oaks to peer about on their perches, uneasy silhouettes 
against the sky. 
170 



THE LAST THRESHING IN THE COULEE 171 

We would gladly have stayed awake to greet our beloved uncles, 
but mother said, " You must go to sleep in order to be up early in 
the morning," and reluctantly we turned away. 

Lying thus in our cot under the sloping raftered roof we could 
hear the squawk of the hens as father wrung their innocent necks, and 
the crash of the " sweeps " being unloaded sounded loud and clear 
and strange. We longed to be out there, but at last the dance of 
lights and shadows on the plastered wall died away, and we fell into 
childish dreamless sleep. 

We were awakened at dawn by the ring beat of the iron mauls as 
Frank and David drove the stakes to hold the " power " to the 
ground. The rattle of trace chains, the clash of iron rods, the clang 
of steel bars, intermixed with the laughter of the men, came sharply 
through the frosty air, and the smell of sizzling sausage from the 
kitchen warned us that our busy mother was hurrying the breakfast 
forward. Knowing that it was time to get up, although it was not 
yet light, I had a sense of being awakened into a romantic new 
world, a world of heroic action. 

As we stumbled down the stairs, we found the lamp-lit kitchen 
empty of the men. They had finished their coffee and were out in 
the stackyard oiling the machine and hitching the horses to the 
power. Shivering, yet entranced by the beauty of the frosty dawn, 
we crept out to stand and watch the play. The frost lay white 
on every surface, the frozen ground rang like iron under the steel- 
shod feet of the horses, and the breath of the men rose up in little 
white puffs of steam. 

Uncle David on the feeder^s stand was impatiently awaiting the 
coming of the fifth team. The pitchers were cHmbing the stacks like 
blackbirds, and the straw-stickers were scuffling about the stable door. 
Finally, just as the east began to bloom, and long streamers of red 
began to unroll along the vast gray dome of sky, Uncle Frank, the 
driver, lifted his voice in a " Chippewa war-whoop." 

On a still morning like this his signal could be heard for miles. 
Long drawn and musical, it sped away over the fields, announcing 
to all the world that the McClintocks were ready for the day's race. 
Answers came back faintly from the frosty fields where dim figures 
of laggard hands could be seen hurrying over the plowed ground, the 
last team came clattering in, and was hooked into its place, David 
called " All right! " and the cylinder began to hum. 



172 THE WORKER AND HIS WORK 

In those days the machine was either a " J. I. Case " or a 
" Buffalo Pitts/' and was moved by five pairs of horses attached to 
a " power " staked to the ground, round which they traveled pulling 
at the ends of long levers or sweeps, and to me the force seemed tre- 
mendous. " Tumbling rods " with " knuckle joints " carried the 
motion to the cylinder, and the driver who stood upon a square 
platform above the huge, greasy cog-wheels (round which the horses 
moved) was a grand figure in my eyes. 

Driving, to us, looked like a pleasant job, but Uncle Frank 
thought it very tiresome, and I can now see that it was. To stand 
on that small platform all through the long hours of a cold November 
day, when the cutting wind roared down the valley sweeping the dust 
and leaves along the road, was work. Even I perceived that it was 
far pleasanter to sit on the south side of the stack and watch the 
horses go round. 

It was necessary that the " driver " should be a man of judgment, 
for the horses had to be kept at just the right speed, and to do this 
he must gauge the motion of the cylinder by the pitch of its deep 
bass song. 

The three men in command of the machine were set apart as 
" the threshers." William and David alternately " fed " or 
" tended," that is, one of them " fed " the grain into the howling 
cylinder while the other, oil-can in hand, watched the sieves, felt of 
the pinions and so kept the machine in good order. The feeder's 
position was the high place to which all boys aspired, and on this day 
I stood in silent admiration of Uncle David's easy powerful attitudes 
as he caught each bundle in the crook of his arm and spread it out 
into a broad, smooth band of yellow straw on which the whirling teeth 
caught and tore with monstrous fury. He was the ideal man in my 
eyes, grander in some ways than my father, and to be able to stand 
where he stood was the highest honor in the world. 

It was all poetry for us and we wished every day were threshing 
day. The wind blew cold, the clouds went flying across the bright 
blue sky, and the straw glistened in the sun. With jarring snarl 
the circling zone of cogs dipped into the sturdy greasy wheels, and 
the singletrees and pulley-chains chirped clear and sweet as crickets. 
The dust flew, the whip cracked, and the men working swiftly to get 
the sheaves to the feeder or to take the straw away from the tail-end 



THE LAST THRESHING IN THE COULEE 173 

of the machine, were like warriors, urged to desperate action by- 
battle-cries. The stackers wallowing to their waists in the fluffy 
straw-pile seemed gnomes acting for our amusement. 

At last the call for dinner sounded. The driver began to call, 
" WTioa there, boys! Steady, Tom," and to hold his long whip 
before the eyes of the more spirited of the teams in order to con- 
vince them that he really meant '' stop." The pitchers stuck their 
forks upright in the stack and leaped to the ground. Randal, the 
band-cutter, drew from his wrist the looped string of his big knife, 
the stackers slid down from the straw-pile, and a race began among 
the teamsters to see whose span would be first unhitched and at the 
v/atering trough. What joyous rivalry it seemed to us! 

Mother and Mrs. Randal, wife of our neighbor, stood ready to 
serve the food as soon as the men were seated. The table had been 
lengthened to its utmost and pieced out with boards, and planks 
had been laid on stout wooden chairs at either side. 

The men came in with a rush, and took seats wherever they could 
find them, and their attack on the boiled potatoes and chicken should 
have been appalling to the women, but it was not. They enjoyed 
seeing them eat. Ed Green was prodigious. One cut at a big potato, 
followed by two stabbing motions, and it was gone. Two bites laid 
a leg of chicken as bare as a slate pencil. To us standing in the 
comer waiting our turn, it seemed that every " smitch " of the din- 
ner was in danger, for the others were not far behind Ed and Dan. 

At last even the gauntest of them filled up and left the room and 
we were free to sit at '' the second table " and eat, while the men 
rested outside. David and William^ however, generally had a belt 
to sew or a bent tooth to take out of the " concave." This seemed of 
grave dignity to us and we respected their self-sacrificing labor. 

Nooning was brief. As soon as the horses had finished their oats, 
the roar and hum of the machine began again and continued steadily 
all afternoon, till by and by the sun grew big and red, the night 
began to fall, and the wind died out. 

This was the most impressive hour of a marvelous day. Through 
the falling dusk, the machine boomed steadily with a new sound, a 
solemn roar, rising at intervals to a rattling impatient yell as the 
cylinder ran momentarily empty. The men moved now in silence, 
looming dim and gigantic in the half-light. The straw-pile mountain 



174 THE WORKER AND HIS WORK 

high, the pitchers in the chaff, the feeder on his platform, and espe- 
cially the driver on his power, seemed almost superhuman to my 
childish eyes. Gray dust covered the handsome face of David, 
changing it into something both sad and stem, but Frank's cheery 
voice rang out musically as he called to the weary horses, " Come on, 
Tom! Hup there, Dan! " 

The track in which they walked had been worn into two deep 
circles and they all moved mechanically round and round, like parts 
of a machine, dull-eyed and covered with sweat. 

At last William raised the welcome cry, " All done! " — the men 
threw down their forks. Uncle Frank began to call in a gentle, 
soothing voice, " Whoa, lads! Steady, boys! Whoa, there! " 

But the horses had been going so long and so steadily that they 
could not at once check their speed. They kept moving, though 
slowly, on and on till their owners slid from the stacks and seizing 
the ends of the sweeps, held them. Even then, after the power was 
still, the cylinder kept its hum, till David, throwing a last sheaf into 
its open maw, choked it into silence. 

Now came the sound of dropping chains, the clang of iron rods, 
and the thud of hoofs as the horses walked with laggard gait and 
weary, down-falling heads to the barn. The men, more subdued 
than at dinner, washed with great care, and combed the chaff from 
their beards. The air was still and cool and the sky a deep cloudless 
blue starred with faint fire. 

Supper, though quiet, was more dramatic than dinner had been.. 
The table lighted with kerosene lamps, the clean white linen, the 
fragrant dishes, the women flying about with steaming platters, all 
seemed very cheery and very beautiful, and the men who came into 
the light and warmth of the kitchen with aching muscles and empty 
stomachs, seemed gentler and finer than at noon. They were nearly 
all from neighboring farms, and my mother treated even the few 
hired men like visitors, and the talk was all hearty and good-tem- 
pered though a little subdued. 

One by one the men rose and slipped away, and father withdrew 
to milk the cows and bed down the horses, leaving the women and 
the youngsters to eat what was left and " do up the dishes." 

After we had eaten our fill, Frank and I also went out to the 
barn (all wonderfully changed now to our minds by the great stack 
of straw), there to listen to David and father chatting as they 



THE LAST THRESHING IN THE COULEE 175 

rubbed their tired horses. The lantern threw a dim red light on the 
harness and on the rumps of the cattle, but left mysterious shadows 
in the comers. I could hear the mice rustling in the straw of the 
roof, and from the farther end of the dimly-lighted shed came the 
regular strim-stram of the streams of milk falling into the bottom 
of a tin pail as the hired hand milked the big roan cow. 

Oh, those blessed days, those entrancing nights! How fine they 
were then, and how mellow they are now, for the slow-paced years 
have dropped nearly fifty other golden mists upon that far-off valley. 



THE POWER PLANT 

By Berton Braley 

Whirr! Whirr! Whirr! Whirr! 

The mighty dynamos hum and purr, 

And the blue flames crackle and glow and bum 

Where the brushes touch and magnets turn! 

Whirr! Whirr! Whirr! Whirr! 

This is no shrine of the Things That Were, 

But the tingling altar of live To-day, 

Where the modern priests of the " Juice " hold sway; 

Where the lights are born and the lightnings made 

To serve the needs of the world of trade. 

Whirr! Whirr! Whirr! Whirr! 

The white lights banish the murky blur. 

And over the city, far and near. 

The spell extends that was conjured here, 

While down in the wheel-pits, far below. 

The water whirls in a ceaseless flow — 

Foaming and boiling, wild and white. 

In a passionate race of tireless might. 

Rushing ever the turbines through, 

And making the dream, the Dream come true! 

Whirr! Whirr! Whirr! Whirr! 

The dynamos croon and hum and purr, 

And over the city's myriad ways. 

The jeweled lights all burst ablaze, 

And the peak-load comes on the burdened wires 

As the fold rush home to their food and fires! 

From Songs of a Workaday World, by Berton Braley. Copyright, 
1915, George H. Doran, Publisher. 
176 



PITTSBURGH 

Way down below the level road on which I stood, way on the opposite side of the 
river, Pittsburgh lies, a dark, low mass, hemmed in by its rivers, lorded by its hills; in 
the hollow the smoke hangs so dense often I could not see the city at all, but once in 
a while a breeze falls on the town, and the great white skyscrapers come forth from the 
thick, black cloud, and the effect is glorious — the glorification of work, for Pittsburgh is 
the work-city of the world. 



THE POWER PLANT 177 

Whirrl Whirr! Whirr! Whirr! 

This is the heart of the city's stir, 

Here where the dynamos croon and sing, 

Here where only the " Juice " is King, 

Where the switchboard stands in its marble pride, 

And the tender watches it, argus-eyed; 

Where Death is harnessed and made to serve 

By keen-faced masters of brain and nerve; 

This is the shrine of the God That Works, 

Driving away the mists and murks, 

Turning the lightnings into use; 

This is the shrine of the mighty " Juice," 

Flowing ever the long wires through, 

And making the dream, the Dream come true! 



12 



THE OPEN HEARTH 

By Herschel S. Hall / 

It was a very black and a very dirty street down which I made 
my way that November morning at half-past five. There was no 
paving, there was no sidewalk, there were no lights. Rain had been 
falling for several days, and I waded through seas of mud and 
sloshed through lakes of water, longing for terra firma. There were 
men in front of me and men behind me, all plodding along through 
the muck and mire, just as I was plodding along, their tin lunch- 
pails rattling as mine was rattling. Some of us were going to work, 
some of us were going to look for work — the steel-mills lay some- 
where in the darkness ahead of us. We were citizens of a city where 
the daylight-saving scheme was being tried out, and half-past five 
in the morning in that city, in the latter part of November, is an 
early hour and a dark one. 

We who were not so fortunate as to possess a magical piece of 
brass, the showing of which to a uniformed guard at the steel-mills' 
gate would cause the door to light and warmth to swing open, waited 
outside in the street, where we milled about in the mud, not unlike 
a herd of uneasy cattle. It was cold out there. A north wind, 
blowing straight in from the lake, whipped our faces and hands and 
penetrated our none-too-heavy clothing. 

" By golly, I wisht I had a job in there! " said a shivering man 
at my side, who had been doing some inspecting through a knot-hole 
in the high fence. " You got a job here? " he asked, glancing 
at my pail. 

I told him I had been promised work and had been ordered 
to report. 

" You're lucky to get a job, and you want to freeze on to it. 
Jobs ain't going' to be any too plentiful this winter, and if this war 
stops — good night! I've been comin' here every momin' for two 
weeks, but I can't get took. I reckon I'm kind o' small for most of 
the work in there." He began to kick his muddy shoes against the 
fence and to blow upon his hands. " Winter's comin','' he sighed. 

A whistle blew, a gate swung open, and a mob of men poured 
178 



THE OPEN HEARTH 179 

out into the street — the night shift going off duty. Their faces looked 
haggard and deathly pale in the sickly glare of the pale-blue arcs 
above us. 

" Night-work's no good," said the small man at my side. " It 
always gets me in the pit of the stummick somethin' fierce, 'long 
between midnight and mornin'. But you got to do it if you're goin' 
to work in the mills. '^ 

A man with a Turkish towel thrown loosely about his neck came 
out of the gate and looked critically at the job hunters. He came 
up to me. " What's yer name? " he demanded. I told him. " Come 
on! " he grunted. 

We stopped before the uniformed guard, who wrote my name on 
a card, punched the card, and gave it to me. " Come on! " again 
grunted the man with the towel. I followed my guide into the yard, 
over railroad tracks, past great piles of scrap-iron and pig metal, 
through clouds of steam and smoke, and into a long, black building 
where engines whistled, bells clanged, and electric cranes rumbled 
and rattled overhead. We skirted a mighty pit filled with molten 
slag, and the hot air and stifling fumes blowing from it struck me in 
the face and staggered me. We crept between giant ladles in whose 
depths I could hear the banging of hammers and the shouting of 
men. We passed beneath a huge trough through which a white, 
seething river of steel was rushing. I shrank back in terror as the 
sound of the roaring flood fell upon my ears, but the man with 
the towel, who was walking briskly in front of me, looked over his 
shoulder and grunted: " Come on! " 

Through a long, hot tunnel and past black, curving flues, down 
which I saw red arms of flame reaching, we made our way. We 
came to an iron stairway, climbed it, and stepped out upon a steel 
floor into the Open Hearth. " Come on! " growled my guide, and 
we walked down the steel floor, scattered over which I saw groups 
of men at work in front of big, house-like furnaces out of whose 
cavernous mouths white tongues of flame were leaping. The men 
worked naked to the waist, or stripped to overalls and undershirt, 
and, watching them, I began to wonder if I had chosen wisely in 
seeking and accepting employment in this inferno. 

" Put yer pail there. Hang yer coat there. Set down there. 
I'll tell the boss ye're here." And the man with the towel went away. 

I was sitting opposite one of the furnaces, a square, squat struc- 



180 THE WORKER AND HIS WORK 

ture of yellow brick built to hold seventy-five tons of steel. There 
were three doors on the front wall, each door having a round opening 
in the center, the " peep-hole." Out through these peep-holes 
poured shafts of light so white and dazzling they pained the eye 
they struck. They were as the glaring orbs of some gigantic uncouth 
monster, and as I looked down the long line of furnaces and saw the 
three fiery eyes burning in each, the effect through the dark, smoke- 
laden atmosphere v/as grotesquely weird. 

I watched a man who worked at one of the doors of the furnace 
nearest me. He had thrust a bar of iron through the peep-hole and 
was jabbing and prying at some object inside. Every ounce of his 
strength he was putting into his efforts. I could hear him grunt as 
he pulled and pushed, and I saw the perspiration dripping from his 
face and naked arms. He withdrew the bar — the end that had been 
inside the door came out as white and as pliable as a hank of taffy — 
and dropped it to the floor. He shouted some command to some 
invisible person, and the door rose slowly and quietly, disclosing to 
me a great, snow-white cavern in whose depths bubbled and boiled 
a seething lake of steel. 

With a quick movement of his hand the workman dropped a pair 
of dark-colored spectacles before his eyes, and his arms went up 
before his face to shield it from the withering blast that poured out 
through the open door. There he stood, silhouetted against that 
piercing light, stooping and peering, tiptoeing and bending, cring- 
ing and twisting, as he tried to examine something back in the fur- 
nace. Then with another shout he caused the door to slip down 
into its place. 

He came walking across the floor to where I sat and stopped in 
front of me. The sweat in great drops fell from his blistered face, 
ran in tiny rivulets from his arms and hands, and splashed on the 
iron floor. He trembled, he gasped for breath, and I thought he 
was going to sink down from pure exhaustion, when, to my surprise, 
he deliberately winked at me. 

" Ought never to have left the farm, ought we? Eh, Buddy? " 
he said with a sweaty chuckle. And that was my introduction to 
Pete, the best open-hearth man I ever knew, a good fellow, clean 
and honest. 

" Mike, put this guy to wheeling in manganese," said a voice 
behind me, and I turned and saw the boss. " Eighteen hundred at 



THE OPEN HEARTH 181 

Number Four and twenty-two hundred at Number Six. Where's 
your pass? " he asked me. 

I handed him the card the uniformed watchman at the gate had 
given me, and he walked away. As he went I heard him say to the 
workman, Pete, with something like a snarl in his voice: " Pull your 
gas down, you fool! " 

" Get that wheelbarrer over yender and foller me," instructed 
Mike, a little, old, white-haired Irishman who was, as I learned 
afterward, called " maid of all work " about the plant. I picked up 
the heavy iron wheelbarrow and trundled it after him, out through 
a runway to a detached building where the various alloys and re- 
fractories used in steel-making were kept. 

" Now, then, you load your wheelbarrer up with this here 
ma'ganese and weigh it over on them scales yender, and then wheel 
it in and put it behind Number Four," Mike told me. " Eighteen 
hundred pounds to that furnace. Then you wheel in twenty-two 
hunderd pounds to Number Six. I'll be watchin' for you when you 
bring in the first load, and show you where to dump it." 

It was cold in the manganese bins. A small yellow electric lamp 
disclosed to my eyes a great pile of angular chunks of gray metaJ. 
I found the pieces surprisingly heavy. I began throwing them into 
my wheelbarrow and had nearly filled it when I heard a laugh. Look- 
ing up I saw a big, red face framed in the one window of the bin. 

" Wot ye think ye're goin' to do with that ma'ganese, young 
feller? " demanded Red Face. 

" Wheel it in and put it behind Number Four furnace," 
I replied. 

" I want to see yer when yer do it," chuckled Red Face. " Yer 
must be some little horse! D'ye know how much yer got on that 
buggy? About eight hunderd pounds! Try to heft it." 

I took hold of the handles and lifted. I could not budge the load. 
Red Face gave another chuckle and disappeared. I threw out about 
three-fourths of the load, weighed the remainder, and found I had 
nearly two hundred pounds. This I wheeled in and put behind the 
furnace, where it would be used when the furnace was tapped. 

" Why is manganese put into the steel? " I asked Pete on one of 
my trips past his furnace. 

" It settles it, toughens it up, and makes it so it'll roll," 
he answered. 



182 THE WORKER AND HIS WORK 

A few days later I asked one of the chemists about the plant the 
same question. " It absorbs the occluded gases in the molten steel, 
hardens it, and imparts the properties of ductility and malleability," 
was his reply. I preferred Pete's elucidation. 

All day I trundled the iron wheelbarrow back and forth along the 
iron floor, wheeling in managanese, magnesite, dolomite, ferro-silicon, 
fire-clay, sulphur rock, fluor-spar and spiegeleisen. All day I watched 
service cars rolling into the long building loaded with pig-iron, scrap- 
iron, and limestone. I watched the powerful electric cranes at work 
picking up the heavy boxes of material and dumping their contents 
into the furnaces. I watched the tapping of the " heats," when the 
dams holding in the boiling lakes would be broken down and the fiery 
floods would go rushing and roaring into the ladles, these to be 
whisked away to the ingot moulds. And I watched the men at work, 
saw the strain they were under, saw the risks they took, and wondered 
if, after a few days, I could be doing what they were doing. 

"It is all very interesting," I said to Pete, as I stood near him, 
waiting for a crane to pass by. 

He grinned. " Uh-huh! But you'll get over it. 'Bout to-morrow 
mornin', when your clock goes rattlety-bang and you look to see 
what's up and find it's five o'clock, you'll not be thinkin' it so inter- 
estin', oh, no! Let's see your hands." He laughed when he saw 
the blisters the handles of the wheelbarrow had developed. 

Pete was right. When my alarm-lock awakened me next morning 
and I started to get out of bed I groaned in agony. Every muscle 
of my body ached. I fancied my joints creaked as I sat on the edge 
of the couch vainly endeavoring to get them to working freely and 
easily. The breakfast bell rang twice, but hurry I could not. 

" You'll be late to work! The others have gone! " called the 
landlady. I managed to creak downstairs. My pail was packed 
and she had tied up an extra lunch in a newspaper. ^' You can't stop 
to eat, if you want to get to work on time," she said. " Your break- 
fast is in this paper — eat it when you get to the mills." 

I stumbled away in the darkness, groaning and gasping, and 
found my way to the black and dirty street. The mud was frozen 
hard now, and the pools of water were ice-covered, and my heavy 
working shoes thumped and bumped along the dismal road in a 
remarkably noisy manner. 

The number of job hunters was larger this morning. Among 



THE OPEN HEARTH 183 

them I saw the small man who could not " get took," and again he 
was peeking wishfully through the knot-hole in the fence. 

" You're on, eh? " he said when he spied me. " By golly, I 
wisht I was. Say, you haven't got a dime in your pants that you 
could spare a feller, have you? " I discovered a dime. 

I showed my brass check — a timekeeper had given me one the 
day before, Number 1266 — to the uniformed watchman. He waved 
me on, and I entered the gate just as the whistle blew. A minute 
later and I would have been docked a half-hour. 

Mike, " maid of all work," took me in hand as soon as I came 
on the floor and proceeded to give me a few pointers. " I kept me 
eye on ye all day yestiddy, and ye fair disgoosted me with the way 
ye cavorted round with that Irish buggy. As though ye wanted to 
do it all the first day! Now, ye're on a twelve-hour turn here, and 
ye ain't expected to work like a fool. Ye want to learn to spell. 
(Mike wasn't referring to my orthographic shortcomings.) When 
the boss is in sight, keep movin'; when he's not, then ease up. Dig 
in like sin whenever ye glimpse a white shirt and collar movin' about 
the plant. Chances is it'll be a fifty-dollar clerk, but until ye find out 
for sure, dig in. Ye'll get in bad with the boss if he sees ye chinnin' 
with Pete. He don't like Pete and Pete don't like him, and I don't 
blame Pete. The boss is solid bone from the collar-button up. He 
has brainstorms. Watch out for 'em." 

I followed much of Mike's advice. All that day I trundled the 
wheelbarrow, but with more — shall I call it circumspection? I made 
an easier day of it, and no one objected to my work. And as the 
days ran by I found my muscles toughening, and I could hear the 
alarm-bell at five in the morning without feeling compelled to 
squander several valuable minutes in wishing I had been bom rich. 

For two weeks I worked every day at wheeling in materials for 
the furnaces. Then for one week I worked with the " maid of all 
work," sweeping the floors and keeping the place " righted up," as 
he called it. Then I " pulled doors " for a while; I " ran tests " to 
the laboratory; I "brought stores"; I was general-utility man. 
Then one day, when a workman dropped a piece of pig-iron on his 
foot and was sent to the hospital, I was put on " second helping." 

By good luck I was sent to Pete's furnace. Pete and I by this 
time were great cronies. Many a chat we had had, back behind his 
furnace, hidden from the prying eyes of the boss. I found Mike 



184 THE WORKER AND HIS WORK 

was right — it was just as well to keep out of his sight. I soon dis- 
covered that he did not like Pete. In numberless mean and petty 
ways did he harass the man, trying to make him do something that 
would give him an excuse to discharge him. But Pete was naturally 
slow to anger, and with admirable strength he kept his feelings 
under control. 

More than once I saw the boss endeavor to lead Pete to strike 
him, and more than once I saw Pete laugh in the scoundrel's face 
and walk away, leaving him wild with rage. I sickened at the ugly 
game the boss played, and wondered when it would end, and how. 

" Oh, I s'pose it'll come to a head some of these days," Pete said 
to me one day as we sat talking about the latest outbreak of the boss. 
" I can't stand it for always. But I'm goin' to make a good job of 
it when it comes." 

I was working nights now, every other week. The small man 
at the gate — he had finally " got took " and was laboring in the yard 
gang — ^who had told me that " night-work is no good — it gets you 
somethin' fierce in the pit of the stummick, 'long between midnight 
and mornin' " — he knew what he was talking about. I found night- 
work absolutely " no good," and it certainly did get me " somethin' 
fierce in the pit of the stummick." The small hours of the night, 
when the body's vitality is at low ebb, the hours when one moans and 
cries in his sleep, when death comes oftenest — they are the terror 
of the night-worker. 

To be aroused by a screaming whistle above your head at two 
o'clock in the morning; to seize a shovel and run to the open door 
of a white-hot furnace and there in its blistering heat to shovel in 
heavy ore and crushed limestone rock until every stitch of clothing 
on your body is soaked with perspiration; to stagger away with 
pulses thumping, and drop down upon a bench, only to be ordered 
out into a nipping winter air to raise or lower a gas-valve — this is 
the kind of work the poet did not have in mind when he wrote that 
" Toil that ennobles! " I doubt whether he or any other poet ever 
heard of this two-o 'clock-in- the-morning toil. 

When the " heat " was ready to tap I would dig out the " tap- 
hole." Another " second helper " would assist me in this work. The 
tap-hole, an opening in the center and lower part of the back wall of 
the furnace, is about a foot in diameter and three in length. It is 
closed with magnesite and dolomite when the furnace is charged. 



THE OPEN HEARTH 185 

Digging this filling out is dangerous work — the steel is liable to break 
out and burn the men who work there. When we had removed the 
dolomite from the hole I would notify the boss. A long, heavy bar 
was thrust through the peepv-hole in the middle door, and a dozen 
men would '' Ye-ho! Ye-ho! " back and forth on the bar until it 
broke through the fused bank of magnesite into the tap-hole. Then 
the lake of steel would pour out through a runner into the ladle. 

This tapping a " heat " is a magnificent and a startHng sight to 
the newcomer. I stood fascinated when I beheld it the first time. 
A lake of seventy-five or eighty tons of sun-white steel, bursting out 
of furnace bounds and rushing through the runner, a raging river, 
is a terrifying spectacle. The eye aches as it watches it; the body 
shrinks away from the burning heat it throws far out on all sides; 
the imagination runs riot as the seething flood roils and boils in 
the ladle. 

Sometimes when we had had a particularly hard spell of work — 
when a heat had melted " soft " and we must throw in extra pig-iron 
by hand, to raise the carbon, or when the bottom had broken down 
and we had labored an hour or two at " splashing " out the steel that 
had run into the honeycombs, or when we would have to build up 
a new back wall — when something of this kind occurred and we had 
pulled and grunted and sweated until we were dead beaten with 
fatigue and exhaustion, then Pete might be expected to put his 
well-known question: " Ought to have stayed on the farm, oughtn't 
we? Hey, buddy? " 

The foolish question, and his comical way of asking it, always 
made me laugh. Seeing that Pete had once been a farm laborer, the 
remark does not appear so silly, after all. It was his way of com- 
paring two kinds of work; it was his favorite stock jest. I know 
farm work, too, from pigs to potatoes, and I do not believe there is 
any kind of farm work known, ten hours of which would equal 
thirty minutes of " splashing " on an open-hearth furnace, in muscle- 
tearing, nerve-racking, back-breaking, sweat-bringing effort. 

" Well, it was like this," Pete began, when I asked him to tell 
me how he came to quit the farm and take to steel-making. " I quit 
farmin' and become a steel-worker the same way a fellow quits bein^ a 
one-horse lawyer and becomes a United States senator — by pure 
accident. I was peggin' away on a Minnesota ranch at eighteen 
dollars a month. One summer when times got slack on the farm I 



186 THE WORKER AND HIS WORK 

run over to Duluth to look around a bit. A fellow there offered me 
a job on a ore boat. I took it and that summer I put in on the lakes. 
The boat tied up that fall at Ashtabula. I got paid off there. I 
thought I'd go back to Minnesota for the winter, so I started to the 
depot. I met a nice-talkin' chap and we swapped a few remi- 
niscences. After he had gone I discovered he'd taken my roll with 
him. It was late and I had no place to sleep, so I went down to the 
railroad yards and crawled in what I thought was a car of white 
sand. Somebody come by and shut the door, and I didn't get out 
of that car till it was opened out there at that bin of spar. They 
needed a man here that day, so I went to work, and here I've been 
ever since — fourteen year this fall. I kind of got the habit of bein' 
round here, and I s'pose I'm done with farmin', but I tell you, some- 
times I fairly wish I was back draggin' down my eighteen per up in 
Minnesota. Them occasions don't last long, though." 

Pete and I were working on Number Three furnace, the latest 
type and the " fastest " of any in the group. Its monthly output was 
three or four hundred tons more than that of any other. It belonged 
to Pete by rights — he was the oldest man on the floor, and he was 
regarded by all the other furnace-men as the best " first helper " in 
the plant. No other " first helper " watched his roof so carefully as 
did he. No other could get as many heats " from a roof " as did he. 
For every three hundred and fifty heats tapped from a furnace before 
the furnace required a new roof, the company gave the " first helper " 
a bonus of fifty dollars. This was to encourage them to watch their 
furnaces closely, to see that the gas did not *' touch " the roofs. 

One morning Pete and I were notified that we were transferred 
to Number Ten, the oldest, the slowest, and the hardest furnace to 
work of any. " Bulger " Lewis, a Welshman, a bosom friend of the 
boss, was to take Number Three. Pete would lose the bonus money 
due in thirty days. 

" What's this for? " he demanded of the boss. 

" Because you don't watch your furnace! " snarled the boss in 
reply. "You've touched that roof! There are icicles on it 
right now! " 

This was a lie. Pete walked over to the air-valves, jerked the 
lever, and threw up the middle door. " Show me an icicle in there! " 
he cried. "I'll give you five hundred dollars for every one you 
point out! " 



THE OPEN HEARTH 187 

" Lower that door! " roared the boss. " And get down to 
Number Ten! Or go get your time, if you prefer! " 

Pete was silent for a moment. Then he threw up his head and 
laughed. Going to his locker, he took out his lunch-pail and started 
for Number Ten. 

" I rather think I am goin' to take a trip to Minnesota pretty 
soon — to see the folks, you know," he said to me that afternoon. 

Number Ten melted " soft " that day and Pete could not get 
the heat hot. We pigged steadily for two hours, but it remained 
cold and dead. We were played out when, about four o'clock, the 
boss came up. 

" Why don't you get that heat out? " he demanded. " You've 
been ten hours on it already! " Pete made no reply. " Where's a test- 
bar? " He shoved the test-bar into the bath, moved it slowly back 
and forth, and withdrew it. " She's hot now! Take her out! " 

Pete looked at the end of the bar. It was ragged, not bitten off 
clean as it would have been had the temperature of the bath been 
right. " She's a long way from bein' hot," he said, pointing at 
the test-bar. 

" Don't you dispute me! " roared the boss. " If I say she's hot, 
she's hot! If I tell you to take her out, you take her out! " 

We took out the heat. And a miserable mess there was. It was 
so cold it froze up in the tap-hole, it froze up in the runner, it froze 
up in the ladle. The entire heat was lost. It was an angry crew 
of men that worked with sledges, bars, and picks cleaning up the 
mess. I was sorry the boss could not know how much that bunch 
of men loved him. 

I saw him approaching Pete; I saw him shaking his clinched fist; 
I heard an ugly word ; the lie was passed, a blow was struck, and the 
long-expected fight was on. 

Out on the smooth iron floor, in the glare of the furnace flames — 
some one had hoisted the three doors to the top — the two enemies 
fought it out. They were giants in build, both of them, muscled 
and thewed like gladiators. It was a brutal, savage exhibition. 
The thud, thud, thud of bare fists on naked flesh was sickening. 
Once Pete trod on a small piece of scrap, lost his balance, and went 
down. With a beast-like cry the boss lunged forward and delib- 
erately kicked him in the face. A yell of rage went up from the 



188 THE WORKER AND HIS WORK 

men surrounding the pair. Had he offered to repeat it they would 
have been upon him. 

But quicker than his movement was Pete's as he leaped to his 
feet and whirled to meet his antagonist. And now again the sick- 
ening thud, thud, thud. That and the dull roaring of the gas as it 
poured through the ports were the only sounds. 

Ah! Thud, thud — smash! And the boss reeled, dropped to his 
knees, swayed back and forth, and went down, his head striking 
the iron floor with a bang. 

Pete took a bath in a bosh, changed his clothes, shook hands all 
round, and came seeking me. " Well, buddy, I'm off," he chuckled, 
peeping at me from a chink in his swollen face. " Like as not I'll 
be shuckin' punkins up in Minnesota this time next week. Oh, no 
use my tryin' to stick it out here — ^you can't stay, you know, when 
you've had a go with the boss. So long! " 

I did not go to work the next day, nor the next. I was deliberat- 
ing whether I would go back at all, the morning of the third day, 
when the " maid of all work " came looking for me. " Pete wants 
you to come to work," he announced. 

" Pete? " I said, wondering what he meant. 

"You said it! Pete's boss now! " 

" No! " 

" Yes! Oh, the super, he ain't blind, he ain't! He knowed what 
was goin' on, he did, and it didn't take him long to fix him when 
he'd heerd the peticlars. I'll tell Pete you'll be comin' along soon." 
And Mike departed. 

I went back and resumed my old position on Number Three, 
with John Yakabowski, a Pole. Yakabowski was an exceptionally 
able furnace-man and an agreeable fellow workman. There was 
great rejoicing all over the plant because our old boss was out, and 
there was general satisfaction over Pete's appointment to his place. 
This feeling among the men was soon reflected in the output of the 
furnaces — our tonnage showed a steady increase. 

Pete was nervous and ill at ease for a few weeks. To assume the 
responsibilities that go with the foremanship of an open-hearth plant 
the size of that one was almost too much for him. He was afraid he 
would make some mistake that would show him to be unworthy of 
the trust the superintendent had placed in him. 

" No education— that's where I'm weak! " he said to me in one of 



THE OPEN HEARTH 189 

our confidential chats. " Can't write, can't figger, can't talk — don't 
know nothin' ! It's embarrassin' ! The super tells me to use two thou- 
sand of manganese on a hundred-and-fifty-thousand-pound charge. 
That's easy — I just tell a hunky to wheel in two thousand. But 
s'pose that lunk-head out in them scales goes wrong, and charges in 
a hundred and sixty-five thousand pounds and doesn't tell me until 
ten minutes before we're ready to tap — ^how am I goin' to figger out 
how much more manganese to put in? Or when the chief clerk 
writes me a nice letter, requestin' a statement showin' how many 
of my men have more than ten children, how many of 'em can read 
the Declaration of Independence, and how many of 'em eat oatmeal 
for breakfast, why, I'm up against it, I tell you! No education! I 
reckon I ought never to've left the farm — hey, buddy? " 

I understood Pete's gentle hint, and I took care of his clerical 
work, writing what few letters he had to send out, making up his 
statements, doing his calculating, and so forth. 

Six months passed. Pete had " made good." The management 
was highly pleased with him as a melter. Success had come to me, 
too, in a modest way — I had been given a furnace — I was now a 
" first helper." It was about the time I took the furnace that I began 
to notice a falling off in the number of requests from Pete for assist- 
ance. I thought little of it, supposing that he was getting his work 
done by one of the weighers. But one night when there was a lull 
in operations and I went down to his office to have a chat with him, 
I found him seated at his little desk poring over an arithmetic. Scat- 
tered about in front of him were a number of sheets of paper covered 
with figures. He looked up at me and grinned in a rather shame- 
faced manner. 

" Oh, that's it, is it? " I said. '' Now I understand why I am no 
longer of any use to the boss! " 

" Well, I just had to do somethin'," he laughed. " Couldn't 
afford to go right on bein' an ignorameous all the time." 

" Are you studying it out alone? " 

"You bet I ain't! I'd never get ther if I was! I've got a teacher, 
a private teacher. Swell, eh? He comes every other night, when 
I'm workin' days, and every other afternoon, when I'm workin' 
nights. Gee, but I'm a bonehead! He's told me so a dozen times, 
but the other day he said he thought I was softenin' up a bit." 



190 THE WORKER AND HIS WORK 

Good old Pete! I left him that night with my admiration for 
the man increased a hundred times. 

Another six months passed, six months of hard, grinding, wearing 
toil, and yet a six months I look back upon with genuine pleasure. 
I now had the swing of the work and it came easy; conditions about 
the plant under Pete's supervision were ideal; I was making progress 
in the profession I had adopted ; we were making good money. Then 
came the black day. 

How quickly it happened ! I had tapped my furnace and the last 
of the heat had run into the ladle. " Ploist away! " I heard Pete 
shout to the crane-man. The humming sound of the crane motors 
getting into action came to my ears. I took a look at my roof, threw 
in a shovelful of spar, turned on the gas, and walked toward the 
rear of the furnace. The giant crane was groaning and whining as 
it slowly lifted its eighty-ton burden from the pit where the ladle 
stood. It was then five or six feet above the pit's bottom. Pete 
was leaning over the railing of the platform directly in front of 
the rising ladle. 

Suddenly something snapped up there among the shafts and 
cables. I saw the two men in the crane cab go swarming up the 
escape-ladder. I saw the ladle drop as a broken cable went flying out 
of a sheave. A great white wave of steel washed over the ladle's 
rim, and another, and another. 

Down upon a shallow pool of water that a leaking hose had 
formed, the steel wave splashed, and as it struck the explosion came. 
I was blown from my feet and rolled along the floor. The air was 
filled with bits of fiery steel, slag, brick and debris of all kinds. I 
crawled to shelter behind a column and there beat out the flames 
that were burning my clothing in a half-dozen places. Then, groping 
through the pall of dust and smoke that choked the building, I went 
to look for Pete. 

Near the place where I had seen him standing when the ladle 
fell I found him. Two workmen who had been crouching behind 
a wall when the explosion came, and were unhurt, were tearing his 
burning clothes from his seared and blackened body. I saw an ugly 
wound on his head where a flying missile of some kind had struck 
him, and his eyes had been shot full of dust and bits of steel. Some- 
body brought a blanket and we wrapped it about him. We doubted 
if he lived, but as we carried him back I noticed he was trying to 



THE OPEN HEARTH 191 

speak, and, stooping, I caught the words: " Ought never to have left 
the farm, ought we? Hey, buddjr? '^ 

That was the last time I ever heard Pete speak. That was the 
last time I ever saw him alive. 

Two o'clock in the morning. Sitting at the little desk where I 
found Pete that night poring over his arithmetic, I have been writing 
down my early experiences in the Open Hearth. Here comes Yaka- 
bowski with a test. I know exactly what he will say: " Had I better 
give her a dose of ore? " Numbers Three, Six, and Ten are " work- 
ing." I must bestir myself. Two o'clock in the morning! The 
small man at the gate was right: Night-work is no good! It has got 
me " somethin' fierce in the pit of the stummick " to-night. 

I was mistaken; Yakabowski doesn't ask his customary ques- 
tion. He looks at me curiously. " You don't look good, boss," he 
says. " You sick, maybe? " 

Yes, I'm sick — sick at the " pit of the stummick." I always am 
at two o'clock in the morning, when I'm on night shift. I stretch, I 
yawn, I shudder. 

" Ought never to have left the farm, ought we? Hey, Yaka- 
bowski? " I say to the big Pole. 



THE IRON WOMAN 
By Margaret Deland 

It was in the late sixties that the children played in the apple- 
tree; at that time the Maitland house was indeed, as poor little Blair 
said, " ugly." Twenty years before, its gardens and meadows had 
stretched over to the river; but the estate had long ago come down 
in size and gone up in dollars. Now, there was scarcely an acre of 
sooty green left, and it was pressed upon by the yards of the Mait- 
land Works, and almost islanded by railroad tracks. Grading had 
left the stately and dilapidated old house somewhat above the level 
of a street noisy with incessant teaming, and generally fetlock-deep 
in black mud. The house stood a little back from the badly paved 
sidewalk; its meager dooryard was inclosed by an iron fence — a row 
of black and rusted spears, dotted under their tines with innumerable 
gray cocoons. 

But it was no wonder that Blair, the son and heir, called it ugly 
— the house, the orchard, the Works — even his mother, in her rusty 
black alpaca dress, sitting at her desk in the big, dingy dining-room, 
driving her body and soul, and the bodies and souls of her workmen 
— all for the sake of the little, shrinking boy. Poor mother! 
Poor son! 

In the days when the four children played in the orchard and 
had lessons with Miss White or Cherry-pie, in the school-room in 
Mr. Ferguson's garret, and were " treated " by Blair to candy or 
pink ice-cream — even in those days Mercer was showing signs of 
what it was ultimately to become: the apotheosis of materialism and 
vulgarity. Iron was entering into its soul. It thought extremely well 
of itself; when a new mill was built, or a new furnace blown in, it 
thought still better of itself. It prided itself upon its growth; in fact, 
its complacency, its ugliness and its size kept pace with one another. 

" Look at our output," Sarah Maitland used to brag to her 
general manager, Mr. Robert Ferguson; " and look at our churches! 
We have more churches for our size than any town west of 
the Alleghanies." 
192 



THE IRON WOMAN 193 

" We need more jails than any town, east or west," Mr. Ferguson 
retorted, grimly. 

Mrs. Maitland avoided the deduction. Her face was full of 
pride. " You just wait! We'll be the most important city in this 
country yet, because we will hold the commerce of the world right 
here in our mills! '^ She put out her great open palm, and slowly 
closed the strong, beautiful fingers into a gripping fist. " The com- 
merce of the world, right here!" she said, thrusting the clenched 
hand, that quivered a little, almost into his face. 

On the other side of the street, opposite the Maitland house, was 
a huddle of wooden tenements. Some of them were built on piles, 
and seemed to stand on stilts, holding their draggled skirts out of 
the mud of their untidy yards; some sagged on rotting sills, leaning 
shoulder to shoulder as if to prop one another up. From each front 
door a shaky flight of steps ran down to the impaved sidewalk, where 
pigs and children and hens, and the daily tramp of feet to and from 
the Maitland Works, had beaten the earth into a hard, black sur- 
face — or a soft black surface when it rained. These little huddling 
houses called themselves Maitland's Shantytown, and they looked 
up at the Big House, standing in melancholy isolation behind its fence 
of iron spears, with the pride that is common to us all when we find 
ourselves in the company of our betters. Back of the little houses was 
a strip of waste land, used for a dump; and beyond it, bristling 
against the sky, the long line of Mercer's stacks and chimneys. 

In spite of such surroundings, the Big House, even as late as the 
early seventies, was impressive. It was square, with four great 
chimneys, and long windows that ran from floor to ceiling. Its 
stately entrance and its two curving flights of steps were of white 
marble, and so were the lintels of the windows; but the stone was so 
stained and darkened with smoky years of rains and river fogs, that 
its only beauty lay in the noble lines that grime and time had not 
been able to destroy, A gnarled and twisted old wistaria roped the 
doorway, and, crawling almost to the roof, looped along the eaves; 
in May it broke into a froth of exquisite purple and faint green, 
and for a week the garland of blossoms, murmurous with bees, lay 
clean and lovely against the narrow, old bricks which had once 
been painted yellow. Outside, the house had a distinction which no 
superficial dilapidation could mar; but inside distinction was almost 
lost in the commonplace, if not in actual ugliness. The double par- 
13 



194 THE WORKER AND HIS WORK 

lors on the right of the wide hall had been furnished in the complete 
vulgarity of the sixties; on the left was the library, which had long 
ago been taken by Mrs. Maitland as a bedroom, for the practical 
reason that it opened into the dining-room; so her desk was easily 
accessible at any time of night, should her passion for toil seize her 
after working-hours were over. The walls of this room were still 
covered with books, that no one ever read. Mrs. Maitland had no 
time to waste on reading; ^' I live,^ she used to say; " I don't read 
about living! " 

The office dining-room was of noble proportions and in its day 
must have had great dignity; but in Blair's childhood its day was 
over. Above the dingy white wainscoting the landscape paper his 
grandfather had brought from France in the thirties had faded into 
a blur of blues and buffs. The floor was uncarpeted save for a 
Persian rug, whose colors had long since dulled to an even grime. 
At one end of the room was Mrs. Maitland's desk; at the other, 
filing-cases, and two smaller desks where clerks worked at ledgers 
or drafting. The four French windows were uncurtained, and the 
inside shutters folded back, so that the silent clerks might have the 
benefit of every ray of daylight filtering wanly through Mercer's 
murky air. A long table stood in the middle of the room; generally 
it was covered with blue-prints, or the usual impedimenta of an office. 
But it was not an office table; it was of mahogany, scratched and 
dim to be sure, but matching the ancient claw-footed sideboard whose 
top was littered with letter files, silver teapots and sugar-bowls, and 
stacks of newspapers. Three times a day one end of this table was 
cleared, and the early breakfast,, or the noon dinner, or the rather 
heavy supper eaten rapidly and for the most part in silence. Mrs. 
Maitland was silent because she was absorbed in thought; Nannie 
and Blair were silent because they were afraid to talk. But the two 
children gave a touch of humanness to the ruthless room. 

" Blair, I have something to say to you before you go. Be at 
my office at the Works at ten-fifteen." She looked at him amiably, 
then pushed back her chair. "Nannie! Get my bonnet. Come! 
Hurry! I'm late! " 

Nannie, running, brought the bonnet, a bunch of rusty black 
crepe, with strings frayed with many tyings. " Oh, mamma," she 
said softly, " do let me get you a new bonnet? " 

Mrs. Maitland was not listening. " Harris! " she called 



THE IRON WOMAN 195 

loudly, " tell Watson to have those roller figures for me at eleven. 
And I want the linen tracing — Bates will know what I mean — at noon 
without fail. Nannie, see that there's boiled cabbage for dinner." 

A moment later the door banged behind her. The abrupt silence 
was like a blow. Nannie and Harris caught their breaths; it was as 
if the oxygen had been sucked out of the air; there was a minute 
before any one breathed freely. Then Blair flung up his arms in a 
wordless protest; he actually winced with pain. He glanced around 
the unlovely room; at the table, with its ledgers and clutter of un- 
matched china — old Canton, and heavy white earthenware, and odd 
cups and saucers with splashing decorations which had pleased Har- 
ris's eye; at the files of newspapers on the sideboard, the grimy walls, 
the untidy fireplace. "Thank Heaven! I'm going off to-day. I 
wish I need never come back," he said. 

" Oh, Blair, that is a dreadful thing to say! " 

" It may be dreadful, but that's the way I feel. I can't help my 
feelings, can I? The further mother and I are apart, the better we 
love each other. Well! I suppose I've got to go and see her bossing 
a lot of men, instead of sitting at home, like a lady." 

Sarah Maitland had gone over to her office in a glow of personal 
pleasure that warmed up the details of business. She intended to take 
Blair that morning through the Works — not as he had often gone 
before, tagging after her, a frightened child, a reluctant boy — ^but as 
the prince, formally looking over the kingdom into which he was 
so soon to come! Nobody would have imagined it, but the big, 
ungainly woman dreamed! Dreamed of her boy, of his business suc- 
cess, of his love, of his life. It was her purpose, on this particular 
morning, to tell him, after* they had gone through the Works, just 
where, when he graduated, he was to begin. Not at the bottom! 
No, Blair need not start at the bottom; he could begui pretty well up 
at the top; and he should have a salary. What an incentive that 
would be! First she would tell him that now, when he was going to 
college, she meant to increase his allowance; then she would tell him 
about the salary he would have when he got to work. How happy 
he would be! To have all the pocket-money he wanted, and a great 
business to look forward to; to have work — work! the finest thing 
in the world — all ready to his hand — what more could a human being 
desire? At the office, she swept through the morning business with 
a speed that took her people off their feet. Once or twice she glanced 



196 THE WORKER AND HIS WORK 

at the clock; Blair was always unpunctual. " He'll get that knocked 
out of him when he gets into business," she thought, grimly. 

It was eleven before he came loitering across the Yards. His 
mother, lifting her head for a moment from her desk, and glancing 
impatiently out of the dirt-begrimed office window, saw him coming, 
and caught the gleam of his patent-leather shoes as he skirted a 
puddle just outside the door. " Well, Master Blair," she said to her- 
self, flinging down her pen, " you'll forget those pretty boots when 
you get to walking around your Works! " 

Blair, dawdling through the outer office, found his way to her 
sanctum, and sat down in a chair beside her desk. He glanced at her 
shrinkingly, and looked away. Her bonnet was crooked; her hair 
was hanging in wisps at the back of her neck; her short skirt showed 
the big, broad-soled foot twisted round the leg of her chair. Blair 
saw the muddy sole of that shoe, and half closed his eyes. 

"You're late," she said; then, without stopping for his excuses, 
she proceeded with the business in hand. " I'm going to increase 
your allowance." 

Blair sat up in astonishment. 

" I mean while you're at college. After that I shall stop the 
allowance entirely, and you will go to work. You will go on a 
salary, like any other man." Her mouth clicked shut in a tight line 
of satisfaction. 

The color flew into Blair's face. " Why! " he said. " You are 
awfully good, mother. Really, I " 

He got up and followed his mother through the Yards — ^vast, 
hideous wastes, scorching in the September heats, full of endless rows 
of pig, piles of scrap, acres, it seemed to Blair, of slag. The screech- 
ing clamor of the place reeked with the smell of rust and rubbish and 
sour earth, and the air was vibrant with the clatter of the " buggies " 
on the narrow-gauge tracks that ran in a tangled network from one 
furnace to another. Blair, trudging along behind his mother, cring- 
ing at the ugliness of everything about him, did not dare to speak. 

Mrs. Maitland walked through her Iron Works as some women 
walk through a garden — ^lovingly. She talked to her son rapidly; 
this was so and so; there was such and such a department; in that 
new shed she meant to put the draftsmen; over there the timekeeper; 
she paused. Blair had left her, and was standing in an open doorway 
of the foundry, watching, breathlessly, a jibcrane bearing a great 



THE IRON WOMAN 197 

ladle full of tons of liquid metal that shimmered above its white-hot 
expanse with the shifting blue flames of escaping gas. Seething and 
bubbling, the molten iron slopped in a flashing film over the side 
of the caldron, every drop, as it struck the black earth, rebounding in 
a thousand exploding points of fire. Above the swaying ladle, far 
up in the glooms under the roof, the shadows were pierced by the 
lurching dazzle of arc-lamps; but when the ladle tipped, and with a 
crackling roar the stream of metal flowed into a mould, the sizzling 
violet gleam of the lamps was abruptly extinguished by the intol- 
erable glare of light. 

" Oh," Blair said breathlessly, " how wonderful! " 

" It is wonderful," his mother said. " Thomas, here, can move 
the lever that tips the ladle \vith his two fingers — and out comes the 
iron as neatly as cream out of a jug! " 

Blair was so entirely absorbed in the fierce magnificence of light, 
and in the glowing torsos of the moulders, planted as they were 
against the profound shadows of the foundry, that when she said, 
" Come on! " he did not hear her. Mrs. Maitland, standing with 
her hands on her hips, her feet well apart, held her head high; she 
was intensely gratified by his interest. " If his father had only lived 
to see him! " she said to herself. In her pride, she almost swaggered; 
she nodded, chuckling, to the moulder at her elbow: 

" He takes to it like a duck to water, doesn't he, Jim? " " And," 
said Jim, telling the story afterward, " I allowed I'd never seen a 
young feller as knowing about castings as him. She took it down 
straight. You can't pile it on too thick for a woman about her 
young 'un." 

" Somebody ought to paint it," Blair said, under his breath. 

Mrs. Maitland's face glowed; she came and stood beside him a 
moment in silence, resting her big, dirty hand on his shoulder. Then 
she said, half sheepishly, " I call that ladle the ' cradle of civilization.' 
Think what's inside of it! There are rails, that will hold New York 
and San Francisco together, and engines and machines for the whole 
world; there are telegraph wires that will bring — think of all the 
kinds of news they will bring, Blair — wars, and births of babies I 
There are bridges in it, and pens that may write — ^well, maybe 
love-letters," she said, with sly and clumsy humor, " or even write, 
perhaps, the liberty of a race, as Lincoln's pen wrote it. Yes! " she 
said, her face full of luminous abstraction, " the cradle of civilization! " 



198 THE WORKER AND HIS WORK 

He could hardly hear her voice in the giant tumult of exploding 
metal and the hammering and crashing in the adjacent mill; but 
when she said that, he looked round at her with the astonishment of 
one who sees a familiar face where he has supposed he would see a 
stranger. He forgot his shame in having a mother who ran an iron- 
mill ; a spark of sympathy leaped between them as real in its invisibil- 
ity as the white glitter of the molten iron sputtering over their heads. 
'' Yes," he said, " it's all that, and it is magnificent, too! " 

" Come on! " she said, with a proud look. Over her shoulder 
she flung back at him figures and statistics; she told him of the tons 
of bridge materials on the books ; the rail contract she had just taken 
was a big thing, very big! " We've never handled such an order, 
but we can do it! " 

They were w^alking rapidly from the foundry to the furnaces; 
Sarah Maitland was inspecting piles of pig, talking to puddlers, all 
the while bending and twisting between her strong fingers, with their 
blackened nails, a curl of borings, perhaps biting on it, thoughtfully, 
while she considered some piece of work, then blowing the crumbs 
of iron out from between her lips and bursting into quick directions 
or fault-finding. She stood among her men, in her short skirt, her 
gray hair straggling out over her forehead from under her shabby 
bonnet, and gave her orders; but for the first time in her life she 
was self-conscious — Blair was looking on! listening! thinking, no 
doubt, that one of these days he would be doing just what she 
was doing! 

When they got back to the office again she was very brief and 
business-like with him. She had had a fine morning, but she couldn't 
waste any more time! " You can keep all this that you have seen 
in your mind. I don't know just where I shall put you. If you have 
a preference, express it." Then she told him what his salary would 
be when he got to work, and what allowance he was to have for 
the present. 

" Now, clear out, clear out! " she said; " good-by "; and turned 
her cheek toward him for their semi-annual parting. Blair, with his 
eyes shut, kissed her. 

'' Good-by, mother. It has been awfully interesting. And I am 
awfully obliged to you about the allowance." On the threshold of 
the office he halted. " Mother," he said — and his voice was gener- 
ous even to wistfulness— "Mother, that cradle thing was stunning." 



CIGAR-MAKING 
By Henry Sydnor Harrison 

The car came to a standstill. 

" There it is. . . . Confess, Hugo, you're surprised, that it's 
so smdl! " 

But Hugo helped no new-thoughter to belittle honest business. 

" Unlike some I could mention, I've seen factories before," 
quoth he. " I've seen a million-dollar business done in a smaller 
plant than that." 

Actually Cally found the Works bigger than she had expected; 
reaction from the childish marble palace idea had swung her mind's 
eye too far. But gazing at the weatherworn old pile, spilling dirtily 
over the broken sidewalk, she was once more struck and depressed 
by something almost sinister about it, something vaguely foreboding. 
To her imagination it was a little as if the ramshackle old pile leered 
at her: '' Wash your hands of me if you will, young lady. I mean 
you harm some day. . . ." 

But then, of course, she wasn't washing her hands of it; her hands 
had never been in it at all. 

" You'll get intensely interested and want to stay hours! " said 
she, with the loud roar of traffic in her ears. " Remember I only 
came for a peep — ^just to see what a Works is like inside." 

Hugo, guiding her over the littered sidewalk to the shabby little 
door marked " Office," swore that she could not make her peep too 
brief for him. 

She had considered the possibility of encountering her father 
here; had seen the difficulties of attributing this foray to Hugo's 
insatiable interest in commerce, with Hugo standing right there. 
However, in the very unpretentious offices inside — desolate places 
of common wood partitions, bare floors, and strange, tail stools and 
desks — she was assurred by an anaemic youth with a red Adam's 
apple that her father had left for the banlc an hour earlier, which 
was according to his usual habit. She inquired for Chas Cooney, 
who kept books from one of those lofty stools, but Chas was reported 
sick in bed. Accordingly the visitors fell into the hands of Mr. 

199 



200 THE WORKER AND HIS WORK 

MacQueen, whom Carlisle, in the years, had seen occasionally enter- 
ing or leaving papa's study o' nights. 

MacQueen was black, bullet-headed, and dour. He had held 
socialistic views in his fiery youth, but had changed his mind like 
the rest of us when he found himself rising in the world. In these 
days he received a percentage of the Works^ profits, and cursed 
the impudence of Labor. As to visitors, his politics were that all 
such had better be at their several homes, and he indicated these 
opinions, with no particular subtlety, to Miss Heth and Mr. Can- 
ning. He even cited them a special reason against visiting to-day: 
new machines being installed, and the shop upset in consequence. 
However, he did not feel free to refuse the request outright, and 
when Canning grew a little sharp — for he did the talking, generously 
enough — the sour vizier yielded, though with no affectation of a 
good grace. 

" Well, as ye like then. . . . This way." 

And he opened a door with a briskness which indicated that 
Carlisle's expressed wish " just to look around " should be car- 
ried out in the most literal manner. 

The opening of this door brought a surprise. Things were so 
unceremonious in the business district, it seemed, that you stepped 
from the superintendent's office right into the middle of everything, 
so to speak. You were inspecting your father's business a minute 
before you knew it. . . . 

Cally, of course, had had not the faintest idea what to expect 
at the Works. She had prepared herself to view horrors with 
calm and detachment, if such proved to be the iron law of busi- 
ness. But, gazing confusedly at the dim, novel spectacle that so 
suddenly confronted her, she saw nothing of the kind. Her heart, 
which had been beating a little faster than usual, rose at once. 

Technically speaking, which was the way Mr. MacQueen spoke, 
this was the receiving- and stemming-room. It was as big as a bam, 
the full size of the building, except for the end cut off to make the 
offices. Negroes worked here ; negro men, m^ostly wearing red under- 
shirts. They sat in long rows, with quick fingers stripping the stems 
from the not unfragrant leaves. These were stemmers, it was learned. 
Piles of the brown tobacco stood beside each stemmer, bales of it 
were stacked, ceiling-high, at the farther end of the room, awaiting 
their attentions. The negroes eyed the visitors respectfully. They 



CIGAR-MAKING 201 

were heard to laugh and joke over their labors. If they knew of any- 
thing homicidal in thsir lot, certainly they bore it with a fine 
humorous courage. 

Down the aisle between the black rows, Cally picked her way 
after Hugo and Mr. MacQueen. Considering that all this was 
her father's, she felt abashingly out of place, most intrusive; when 
she caught a dusky face turned upon her she hastily looked another 
way. Still, she felt within her an increasing sense of cheerfulness. 
Washington Street sensibilities were offended, naturally. The busy 
colored stemmers were scarcely inviting to the eye; the odor of the 
tobacco soon grew a little overpowering; there were dirt and dust and 
an excess of steam-heat — ^^ Tobacco likes to be warm," said Mac- 
Queen. And yet the dainty visitor's chief impression, somehow, was 
of system and usefulness and order, of efficient and on the whole 
well-managed enterprise. 

" If there's anything the matter here," thought she, " men will 
have to quarrel and decide about it. . . . Just as I said." 

The inspecting party went upward, and these heartening im- 
pressions were strengthened. On the second floor was another 
stemming-room, long and hot Uke the other; only here the stem- 
ming was done by machines — " for the fancy goods " — and the 
machines were operated by negro women. They were middle-aged 
women, many of them, industrious and quite placid-looking. Per- 
haps a quarter of the whole length of the room was prosaically filled 
with piled tobacco stored ready for the two floors of stemmers. The 
inspection here was brief, and to tell the truth, rather tame, like an 
anti-climax. Not a trace or a vestige of homicide was descried, 
not a blood-spot high or low. . . . 

Cally had been observing Hugo, who looked so resplendent 
against this workaday background, and felt herself at a disadvan- 
tage with him. He had not wanted to come at all, but now that 
they were here, he exhibited a far more intelligent interest in what 
he saw than she did or could. Oddly enough, he appeared to know 
a good deal about the making of cigars, and his pointed comments 
gradually elicited a new tone from MacQueen, who was by now 
talking to him almost as to an equal. Several times Cally detected 
his eyes upon her, not bored but openly quizzical. 

" Learning exactly how a cheroot factory ought to be run? " he 
asked, sotto voce, as they left the second floor. 



202 THE WORKER AND HIS WORK 

" Oh, exactly . . . For one thing, I'd recommend a ventilator 
or two, shouldn't you? " 

She felt just a little foolish. She also felt out of her element, 
incidental, irresponsible, and genuinely relieved. Still, through 
this jumble of feelings she had not forgotten that they were yet to 
see that part of the Works which she had specially come to 
peep at. . . . 

Progress upward was by means of a most primitive elevator, 
nothing but an open platform of bare boards, which Mr. Mac- 
Queen worked with one hand, and which interestingly pushed up 
the floor above as one ascended. As they rose by this quaint device, 
Carlisle said: 

" Is this next the bunching-room, Mr. MacQueen? " 

" It is, Miss." 

" Bunching-room! " echoed Hugo, with satiric admiration. "You 
are an expert. . . ." 

The lift-shaft ran in one corner of the long building. Debark- 
ing on the third floor, the visitors had to step around a tall, shin- 
ing machine, not to mention two workmen who had evidently 
just landed it. Several other machines stood loosely grouped here, 
all obviously new and not yet in place. 

Hugo, pointing with his stick, observed: " Clearing in new 
floor-space, I see." 

MacQueen nodded. " Knocked out a cloak-room. Our fight 
here's for space. Profits get smaller all the time. . . ." 

" H'm. . . . You figured the strain, I suppose. Your floor 
looks weak." 

" Oh, it'll stand it," said the man, shortly. " This way." 

Carlisle wondered if the weak floor was what her friend Vivian 
had meant when he said, in his extreme way, that the Works might 
fall down some day. She recalled that she had thought the building 
looked rather rickety, that day last year. But these thoughts hardly 
entered her mind before the sight of her eyes knocked them out. 
The visitors squeezed around the new machines, and, doing so, 
stepped full into the bunching-room. And the girl saw in one glance 
that this was the strangest, most interesting room she had ever seen. 

Her first confused sense was only of an astonishing mass of dirty 
white womanhood. The thick hot room seemed swarming with 
women, alive and teeming -with women, women tumbling all over 



CIGAR-MAKING 203 

each other wherever the eye turned. Tall clacking machines ran 
closely around the walls of the room, down the middle stood a 
double row of tables; and at each machine, and at every possible 
place at the tables, sat a woman crowded upon a woman, and an- 
other and another. 

Dirt, noise, heat, and smell: women, women, women. Conglom- 
eration of human and inhuman such as the eyes of the refined 
seldom look upon. . . . Was this, indeed, the pleasantest place 
to work in town? . . . 

" Bunchin' and wrappin','' said MacQueen. " Filler's fed in 
from that basin on top. She slips in the binder — machine rolls 'em 
together. ... Ye can see here." 

They halted by one of the bunching-machines, and saw the 
parts dexterously brought together into the crude semblance of 
the product, saw the embryo cigars thrust into wooden forms which 
would shape them yet further for their uses in a world asmoke. . . . 

"Jove! Watch how her hands fly! " said Hugo, with manlike 
interest for processes, things done. " Look, Carlisle." 

Carlisle looked dutifully. It was in the order of things that she 
should bring Hugo to the Works, and that, being here, he should 
take charge of her. But, unconsciously, she soon turned her back 
to the busy machine, impelled by the mounting interest she felt to 
see bunching, not in detail, but in the large. 

Downstairs the workers had been negroes; here they were v/hite 
women, a different matter. But Cally had a closer association than 
that, in the girl she had just been talking to, Corinne, who had 
worked three years in this room. It wasn't so easy to preserve the 
valuable detached point of view, when you actually knew one of 
the people. . . . 

" Three cents a hundred," said MacQueen's rugged voice. 

There was a fine brown dust in the air of the teeming room, and 
the sickening smell of new tobacco. Not a window in the place 
was open, and the strong steam heat seemed almost overwhelming. 
The women had now been at it for near nine hours. Damp, streaked 
faces, for the most part pale and somewhat heavy, turned incessantly 
toward the large wall-clock at one end of the room. Eyes looked 
sidewise upon the elegant visitors, but then the flying fingers were off 
again, for time is strictly money with piecework. . . . How could 
they stand being so crowded, and couldn't they have any air? 



204 THE WORKER AND HIS WORK 

" Oh, five thousand a day — ^plenty of them." 

'' Five thousand! — ^how do they do it? " 

" We had a girl do sixty-five hundred. She's quit. . . . Here's 
one down here ain't bad." 

The trio moved down the line of machines, past soiled, busy 
backs. Close on their left was the double row of tables, where the 
hurrying " wrappers " sat like sardines. Cally now saw that these 
were not women at all, but young girls, like Corinne; girls mostly 
younger than she herself, some very much younger. Only they 
seemed to be girls with a difference, girls who had somehow lost 
their girlhood. The rather nauseating atmosphere which enveloped 
them, the way they were huddled together yet never ceased to drive 
on their tasks, the slatternly uncorseted figures, stolid faces and 
furtive glances; by something indefinable in their situation, these 
girls seemed to have been degraded and dehumanized, to have lost 
something more precious than virtue. 

Yet some of them were quite pretty, beneath dust and fatigue; 
one, with a quantity of crinkly auburn hair, was very pretty, indeed. 
The girl Corinne, after three years here, was both pretty and pos- 
sessed of a certain delicacy; a delicacy which forbade her to tell 
Mr. Heth's daughter what she really thought about the Works. 
For that must have been it. . . . 

" This 'un can keep three wrappers pretty busy when she's 
feelin' good. Can't yer. Miller? . . . Ye'll see the wrappers 
there, in a minute." 

This 'un, or Miller, was a tall, gaunt, sallow girl, who handled 
her machine with the touch of a master, eliminating every super- 
fluous move and filling a form of a dozen rough cheroots quickly 
enough to take a visitor's breath away. No doubt it was very in- 
structive to see how fast cheroots could be made. However, the 
stirring interest of the daughter of the Works was not for me- 
chanical skill. 

Cally stood with a daintily scented handkerchief at her nos- 
trils, painfully drinking in the origins of the Heth fortune. The 
safeguarding sense of irresponsibility ebbed, do what she might. 
Well she knew that this place could not be so bad as it seemed to 
her; for then her father would not have let it be so. For her to 
seem to disapprove of papa's business methods was mere silly im- 
pertinence, on top of the disloyalty of it. But none of the sane pre- 



CIGAR-MAKING 205 

cepts she had had two weeks to think out seemed to make any 
answer to the disturbing sensations she felt rising, like a sickness, 
within her. . . . 

Her sense was of something polluting at the spring of her life. 
Here was the soil that she was rooted in, and the soil was not clean. 
It might be business, it might be right ; but no argument could make 
it agreeable to feel that the money she wore upon her back at this 
moment was made in this malodorous place, by these thickly crowded 
girls. . . . Was it in such thoughts that grew this sense of some 
personal relation of herself with her father's most unpleasant bunch- 
ing-room? Was it for such reasons that V. Vivian had asked her 
that day at the Settlemen^t why did.n'^ she go to the Works 
some day? . . . 

She heard Hugo's voice, with a note of admiration for visible effi- 
ciency: " How do they keep it up at this clip nine hours? " 

" Got to do it, or others will." 

" You expect each machine to produce so much, I suppose? " 

And Cally, so close to her lordly lover that her arm brushed 
his, was seeing for the first time in her life what people meant 
when they threw bricks at papa on election night, or felt the strong 
necessity of attacking him in the papers. By processes that were 
less mental than emotional, even physical, she was driven further 
down a well-trod path and stood dimly confronting the outlines of a 
vast interrogation. . . . What particular human worth had she, 
Cally Heth, that the womanhood of these lower-class sisters should 
be sapped that she might wear silk next her skin, and be bred to 
appeal to the highly cultivated tastes of a Canning? . . . 

If there are experiences which permanently extend the frontiers 
of thought, it was not in this girl's power to recognize one of them 
closing down on her now. But she did perceive, by the growing com- 
motion within, that she had made a great mistake to come to 
this place. . . . 

" Now, here's wrapping," said MacQueen. " Hand work, 
you see." 

But his employer's daughter, it appeared, had seen enough of 
cigar-making for one day. At that moment she touched Canning's 
well-tailored arm. 

"Let's go. . . . It's— stifling here." 

Hugo, just turning from the bunching-machine, regarded her 



206 THE WORKER AND HIS WORK 

faintly horrified face with some amusement. And Carlisle saw that 
he was amused. 

" I was wondering," said he, " how long yoiu: sociology would 
survive this air. . . ." 

The peep was meant to end there, and should have done so. 
But unluckily, at just that juncture, there came a small diver- 
sion. The gaunt girl Miller, by whose machine the little party 
stood, took it into her head to keep at it no longer. 

Though nobody had noticed it, this girl had been in trouble 
for the last five minutes. The presence of the visitors, or of the 
superintenedent, had evidently made her nervous; she kept look- 
ing half-around out of the darting corners of her eyes. Three 
times, as the men watched and talked about her, she had raised a 
hand in the heat and brushed it hurriedly before her eyes. And 
then, just as the superintendent turned from her and all would 
have been well again, her overdrawn nerve gave out. The hands 
became suddenly limp on the machine they knew so well; they 
slid backward, at first slowly and then with the speed of a fall- 
ing body; and poor Miller slipped quietly from her stool to the 
floor, her head actually brushing the lady's skirt as she fell. 

Cally stifled a little cry. Hugo, obvious for once, said, " Why, 
she's fainted! " — in an incredulous voice. Considerably better in 
action were the experienced Works people. MacQueen sprang for a 
water-bucket with a celerity which strongly suggested practice. A 
stout, unstayed buncher filled a long-felt want by flinging open a 
window. One from a neighboring machine sat on the floor, Miller's 
head on her lap. Two others stood by. . . . 

Carlisle, holding to the silenced machine with a small gloved 
hand, gazed down as at a bit of stage-play. 

They had formed a screen about the fallen girl, under Mac- 
Queen's directions, to cut her off from the general view. The 
superintendent's gaze swept critically about. However, the sud- 
den confusion had drawn the attention of all that part of the room, 
and concealment proved a too optimistic liope. The moment hap- 
pened to be ripe for one of those curious panics of the imagination 
to which crowded womanhood is psychologically subject. Knowl- 
edge that somebody was down ran round the room as if it had been 
shouted; and on the knowledge, fear stalked among the tired girls, 
and the thing itself was born of the dread of it. 



CIGAR-MAKING 207 

So it was that Carlisle, gripping fast to poor Miller's machine, 
heard an odd noise behind her, and turned with a sickening drop- 
ping of the heart. Five yards away a girl gave a little moan and 
flopped forward upon her machine. She was a fine, strapping young 
creature, and it is certain that two minutes before nothing had 
been further from her mind than fainting. It did not stop there. 
Far up the room a " wrapper " rose in the dense air, took her head 
in both hands and fell backward into the arms of the operative 
next her. In the extreme corner of the great room a little stir indi- 
cated that another had gone down there. Work had almost ceased. 
Many eyes stared with sudden nervous apprehension into other eyes, 
as if to say: " Am I to be the next? ..." 

MacQueen's voice rang out — a fine voice it was, the kind that 
makes people sit down again in a fire-scared theatre: 

" Take your seats, every one of you. . . . Nothing's going to 
happen. You're all right, I say. Go on with your work. Sit down. 
Get to work. . . ." 

" Air," said Cally Heth, in a small colorless voice. 

Hugo wheeled sharply. 

" Great heavens! — Carlisle! ... Do you feel faint? " 

He had her at the open window in a trice, clasping her arm 
tight, speaking masculine encouragement. ..." Hold hard, my 
dear! ... I should have watched you. . . . Now, breathe 
this. . . . Gulp it in, Cally. . . ." 

His beloved, indeed, like the work-sisters, had felt the brush of 
the black wing. For an instant nothing had seemed surer than 
that the daughter of the Works would be the fifth girl to faint in 
the bunching-room that day; she had seen the floor rise under her 
whirling vision. ... 

But once at the window the dark minute passed speedily. The 
keen October air bore the gift of life. Blood trickled back into 
the dead white cheeks. 

" I . . . was just a little dizzy," said Cally, quite apologetically. 

And, though the visitors departed then, almost immediately, all 
signs of the sudden little panic in the bunching-room were already 
rapidly disappearing. Work proceeded. The gaunt girl Miller, who 
had earned MacQueen^s permanent dislike by starting all the trouble, 
was observed sitting again at her machine, hands and feet reaching 
out for the accustomed levers. 



A PRINTING-OFFICE 
By Arnold Bennett 



Darius Clayhanger's printing-office was a fine example of the 
policy of makeshift which governed and still governs the commercial 
activity of the Five Towns. It consisted of the first floor of a nonde- 
script building which stood at the bottom of the irregularly shaped 
yard behind the house and shop, and which formed the southern 
boundary of the Clayhanger premises. The antique building had 
once been part of an old-fashioned pot-works, but that must have 
been in the eighteenth century. Kilns and chimneys of all ages, sizes 
and tints rose behind it to prove that this part of the town was one 
of the old manufacturing quarters. The ground floor of the build- 
ing, entirely inaccessible from Clayhanger's yard, had a separate 
entrance of its own in an alley, that branched off from Woodisun 
Bank, ran parallel to Wedgwood Street and stopped abruptly at the 
back gate of a saddler's workshop. In the narrow entry you were 
like a creeping animal amid the undergrowth of a forest of chimneys, 
ovens and high blank walls. This ground floor had been a stable 
for many years; it was now, however, a baker's store-room. Once 
there had been an interior staircase leading from the ground floor 
to the first floor, but it had been suppressed in order to save floor 
space, and an exterior staircase constructed with its foot in Clay- 
hanger's yard. To meet the requirement of the staircase one of the 
first-floor windows had been transformed into a door. Further, as 
the staircase came against one of the ground-floor windows, and as 
Qayhanger's predecessor had objected to those alien windows over- 
looking his yard, and as numerous windows were anyhow unneces- 
sary to a stable, all the ground-floor windows had been closed up, 
with oddments of brick and tile, giving to the wall a very variegated 
and chequered appearance. Thus the ground floor and the first 
floor were absolutely divorced, the former having its entrance and 
light from the public alley, the latter from the private yard. 

From Clayhanger, by Arnold Bennett. Copyright, 1910, George H. 
Doran, Publisher. 
208 



A PRINTING-OFFICE 209 

The first floor had been a printing-office for over seventy years. 
All the machinery in it had had to be manoeuvered up the rickety 
stairs or put through one of the windows on either side of the window 
that had been turned into a door. When Darius Clayhanger, in his 
audacity, decided to print by steam, many people imagined that he 
would at last be compelled to rent the ground floor or to take other 
premises. But no! The elasticity of the makeshift policy was not 
yet fully stretched. Darius, in consultation with a jobbing builder, 
came happily to the conclusion that he could " manage,'^ that he 
could " make things do," by adding to the top of his stairs a little 
landing for an engine-shed. This was done, and the engine and 
boiler perched in the air; the shaft of the engine went through the 
wall; the chimney-pipe of the boiler ran up straight to the level of 
the roof-ridge and was stayed with pieces of wire. A new chimney 
had also been pierced in the middle of the roof, for the uses of a 
heating stove. The original chimneys had been allowed to fall into 
decay. Finally, a new large skylight added interest to the roof. In 
a general way, the building resembled a suit of clothes that had been 
worn during four of the seven ages of man by an untidy husband 
with a tidy and economical wife, and then given by the wife to a 
poor relation of a somewhat different figure, to finish. All that could 
be said of it was that it survived and served. 

But these considerations occurred to nobody. 

n 

Edwin Clayhanger left the shop without due excuse and passed 
down the long blue-paved yard towards the printing-office. He 
imagined that he was being drawn thither simply by his own curiosity 
— a curiosity, however, which he considered to be justifiable, and even 
laudable. The yard showed signs that the unusual had lately been 
happening there. Its brick pavement, in the narrow branch of it 
that led to the double gates in Woodisun Bank (those gates which 
said to the casual visitor, "No admittance except on Business"), 
was muddy, littered and damaged, as though a Juggernaut had passed 
that way. Ladders reclined against the walls. Moreover, one of the 
windows of the office had been taken out of its frame, leaving naught 
but an oblong aperture. Through this aperture Edwin could see the 
busy eager forms of his father. Big James, and Chawner. Through 
this aperture had been lifted, in parts and by the employment of 
14 



210 THE WORKER AND HIS WORK 

every possible combination of lever and pulley, the printing machine 
which Darius Clayhanger had so successfully purchased in Man- 
chester on the day of the Free-and-Easy at the Dragon. 

At the top of the flight of steps two apprentices, one nearly " out 
of his time," were ministering to the engine, which that morning did 
not happen to be running. The engine, giving glory to the entire 
establishment by virtue of the imposing word " steam," was a 
crotchety and capricious thing, constant only in its tendency to 
break down. No more reliance could be placed on it than on a pan> 
pered donkey. Sometimes it would run, and sometimes it would 
not run, but nobody could safely prophesy its moods. Of the sev- 
eral machines it drove but one, the grand cylinder, the last triumph 
of the ingenuity of man, and even that had to be started by hand 
before the engine would consent to work it. The staff hated the 
engine, except during those rare hours when one of its willing moods 
coincided with a pressure of business. Then, when the steam was 
sputtering and the smoke smoking and the piston throbbing, and the 
leathern belt traveling round and round and the complete building 
a-tremble and a-clatter and an attendant with clean hands was feed- 
ing the sheets at one end of the machine and another attendant with 
clean hands taking them off at the other, all at the rate of twenty 
copies per sixty seconds — then the staff loved the engine and meditated 
upon the wonders of their modern civilization. The engine had been 
known to do its five thousand in an afternoon, and its horse-power 
was only one. 

Ill 

Edwin could not keep out of the printing-office. He went incon- 
spicuously and as it were by accident up the stone steps and disap- 
peared into the interior. When you entered the office you were 
first of all impressed by the multiplicity of odors competing for your 
attention, the chief among them being those of ink, oil, and paraffin. 
Despite the fact that the door was open and one window gone, the 
smell and heat in the office on that warm morning were notable. Old 
sheets of the " Manchester Examiner " had been pinned over the 
skylight to keep out the sun, but as these were torn and rent the 
sun was not kept out. Nobody, however, seemed to suffer incon- 
venience. After the odors, the remarkable feature of the place was 
the quantity of machinery on its uneven floor. Timid employes had 



A PRINTING-OFFICE 211 

occasionally suggested to Darius that the floor might yield one day 
and add themselves and all the machinery to the baker's stores 
below; but Darius knew that floors never did yield. 

In the middle of the floor was a huge and heavy heating stove, 
whose pipe ran straight upwards to the visible roof. The mighty 
cylinder machine stood to the left hand. Behind was a small rough- 
and-ready binding department with a guillotine cutting machine; 
a cardboard cutting machine, and a perforating machine; trifles by 
the side of the cylinder, but still each of them formidable masses of 
metal heavy enough to crush a horse; the cutting machines might 
have served to illustrate the French Revolution, and the perforating 
machine the Holy Inquisition. 

Then there was what was called in the office the " old machine," 
a relic of Clayhanger's predecessor, and at least eighty years old. 
It was one of those machines whose worn physiognomies full of 
character show at once that they have a history. In construction it 
carried solidity to an absurd degree. Its pillars were like the piles of 
a pier. Once, in a historic rat-catching, a rat had got up one of 
them, and a piece of smouldering brown paper had done what a terrier 
could not do. The machine at one period of its career had been 
enlarged, and the neat seaming of the metal was an ecstasy to the 
eye of a good workman. Long ago, it was known, this machine had 
printed a Reform newspaper at Stockport. Now, after thus par- 
ticipating in the violent politics of an age heroic and unhappy, it 
had been put to printing small posters of auctions and tea-meetings. 
Its movement was double, first that of a handle to bring the bed 
under the platen, and second a lever pulled over to make contact 
between the type and the paper. It still worked perfectly. It was so 
solid, and it had been so honestly made, that it could never get out 
of order nor wear away. And indeed the conscientiousness and skill 
of artificers in the eighteenth century are still, through that resistless 
machine, producing their effect in the twentieth. But it needed a 
strong hand to bestir its smooth plum-colored limbs of metal, and a 
speed of a hundred an hour meant gentle perspiration. The machine 
was loved like an animal. 

Near this honorable and lumbering survival stood pertly an Empire 
treadle-machine for printing envelopes and similar trifles. It was new 
and full of natty Httle devices. It worked with the lightness of 



212 THE WORKER AND HIS WORK 

something insubstantial. A child could actuate it, and it would print 
delicately a thousand envelopes an hour. This machine, with the 
latest purchase, which was away at the other end of the room near 
the large double-pointed case-rack, completed the tale of machines. 
That case-rack alone held fifty different fonts of type, and there were 
other case-racks. The lead-rack was nearly as large, and beneath 
the lead-rack was a rack containing all those " furnitures " which 
help to hold a form of type together without betraying themselves 
to the reader of the printed sheet. And under the furniture-rack 
was the " random," full of galleys. Then there was a table with 
a top of solid stone, upon which the forms were bolted up. And there 
was the ink-slab, another solidity, upon which the ink-rollers were 
inked. Rollers of various weightiness lay about, and large heavy 
cans, and many bottles, and metal galleys, and nameless fragments 
of metal. Everything contributed to the impression of immense 
ponderosity exceeding the imagination. The fancy of being pinned 
down by even the lightest of those constructions was excruciating. 
You moved about in narrow alleys among upstanding unyielding 
metallic enormities, and you felt fragile and perilously soft. 



IV 

The only unintimidating phenomena in the crowded place were the 
lye-brushes, the dusty job-files that hung from the great transverse 
beams, and the proof-sheets that were scattered about. These 
printed things showed to what extent Darius Clayhanger's establish- 
ment was a channel through which the life of the town had some- 
how to pass. Auctions, meetings, concerts, sermons, improving lec- 
tures, miscellaneous entertainments, programs, catalogues, deaths, 
births, marriages, specifications, municipal notices, summonses, de- 
mands, receipts, subscription-lists, accounts, rate-forms, lists of voters, 
jury-lists, inaugurations, closures, billheads, handbills, addresses, 
visiting-cards, society-rules, bargain-sales, lost and found notices; 
traces of all these matters, and more, were to be found in that office; 
it was impregnated with the human interest; it was dusty with the 
human interest; its hot smell seemed to you to come off life itself, 
if the real sentiment and love of life were sufficiently in you. A 
grand, stuffy, living, seething place, with all its metallic immobility! 



A PRINTING-OFFICE 213 



Edwin sidled towards the center of interest, the new machine, 
which, however, was not a new machine. Darius Clayhanger did 
not buy more new things than he could help. His delight was to 
" pick up " articles that were supposed to be " as good as new "; 
occasionally he would even assert that an object bought second-hand 
was " better than new," because it had been " broken in," as if it 
were a horse. Nevertheless, the latest machine was, for a printing 
machine, nearly new; its age was four years only. It was a Demy- 
Columbian press, similar in conception and movement to the historic 
" old machine" that had been through the Reform movement; but 
how much lighter, how much handier, how much more ingenious and 
precise in the detail of its working! A beautiful edifice as it stood 
there, gazed on admiringly by the expert eyes of Darius, in his 
shirt-sleeves. Big James, the foreman, in his royally flowing apron, 
and Chawner, the journeyman compositor, who, with the two appren- 
tices outside, completed the staff! Aided by no mechanic more 
skilled than a day-laborer those men had got the machine piecemeal 
into the office and had duly erected it. At that day a foreman had 
to be equal to anything. 

The machine appeared so majestic there, so solid and immovable, 
that it might ever have existed where it then was. Who could credit 
that less than a fortnight earlier it had stood equally majestic, solid, 
and immovable at Manchester? There remained nothing to show 
how the miracle had been accomplished except a bandage of ropes 
round the lower pillars and some pulley-tackle hanging from one of 
the transverse beams exactly overhead. The situation of the machine 
in the workshop had been fixed partly by that beam above and partly 
by the run of the beams that supported the floor. The stout roof- 
beam enabled the artificers to handle the great masses by means of 
the tackle; and as for the floor-beams, Darius had so far listened to 
warnings as to take them into account. 



VI. 

" Take another impress, James," said Darius. And when he saw 
Edwin, instead of asking the youth what he was wasting his time 
there for, he good-humoredly added: " Just watch this, my lad." 
Darius was pleased with himself, his men, and his acquisition. He 



214 THE WORKER AND HIS WORK 

was in one of his moods when he could charm ; he was jolly, and he 
held up his chin. Two days before, so interested had he been in the 
Demy-Columbian, he had actually gone through a bilious attack 
while scarcely noticing it. And now the whole complex operation had 
been brought to a triumphant conclusion. 

Big James inserted the sheet of paper, with gentle and fine move- 
ments. The journeyman turned the handle, and the bed of the 
machine slid horizontally forward in frictionless, stately silence. 
And then Big James seized the lever with his hairy arm bared to the 
elbow, and pulled it over. The delicate process was done with minute 
and level exactitude; and adjusted to the thirty-second of an inch, 
the great masses of metal had brought the paper and the type to- 
gether and separated them again. In another moment Big James 
drew out the sheet, and the three men inspected it, each leaning over 
it. A perfect impression 1 Edwin could read the characters in shining 
wet ink: " Bailiwick of Bursley " — A perfect jmpression! 

" Well," said Darius, glowing. " WeVe had a bit o' luck in getting 
that up! Never had less trouble! Shows we can do better without 
those Foundry chaps than with 'em! James ye can have a quart 
brought in, if ye'n a mind, but I won't have them apprentices drink- 
ing! No, I won't! Mrs. Nixon '11 give 'em some nettle-beer if they 
fancy it." 

He was benignant. The inauguration of a new machine deserved 
solemn recognition, especially on a hot day. It was an event. 

" A infant-in-arms could turn this here," murmured the journey- 
man, toying with the handle that moved the bed. It was an exag- 
geration, but an excusable, poetical exaggeration. 

Big James wiped his wrists on his apron. 

vn 

Then there was a queer sound of cracking somewhere, vague, faint, 
and yet formidable. Darius was standing between the machines and 
the dismantled window, his back to the latter. Big James and the 
journeyman rushed instinctively from the center of the floor towards 
him. In a second the journeyman was on the window-sill. 

" What art doing? " Darius demanded roughly; but there was no 
sincerity in his voice. 

" Th' floor! " the journeyman excitedly exclaimed. 



A PRINTING-OFFICE 215 

Big James stood close to the wall. 

" And what about th' floor? " Darius challenged him obstinately. 

" One o' them beams is a-going," stammered the journeyman. 

" Rubbish! " shouted Darius. But simultaneously he motioned 
to Edwin to move from the middle of the room, and Edwin obeyed. 
All four listened, with nerves stretched to the tightest. Darius was 
biting his lower lip with his upper teeth. His humor had swiftly 
changed to the savage. Every warning that had been uttered for 
years past concerning that floor was remembered with startling dis- 
tinctness. Every impatient reassurance offered by Darius for years 
past suddenly seemed fatuous and perverse. How could any man 
in his senses expect the old floor to withstand such a terrific strain 
as that to which Darius had at last dared to subject it? The floor 
ought by rights to have given way years ago ! His men ought to have 
declined to obey instructions that were obviously insane. These and 
similar thoughts visited the minds of Big James and the journeyman. 

As for Edwin, his excitement was, on balance, pleasurable. In 
truth, he could not kill in his mind the hope that the floor would 
yield. The greatness of the resulting catastrophe fascinated him. 
He knew that he should be disappointed if the catastrophe did not 
occur. That it would mean ruinous damage to the extent of hundreds 
of pounds, and enormous worry, did not influence him. His reason 
did not influence him, nor his personal danger. He saw a large 
hook in the wall to which he could cling when the exquisite crash 
came, and he pictured a welter of broken machinery and timbers ten 
feet below him, and the immense pother that the affair would create 
in the town. 

vni 

Darius would not lose his belief in his floor. He hugged it in 
mute fury. He would not climb on to the v/indow-sill, nor tell 
Big James to do so, nor even Edwin. On the subject of the floor he 
was religious; he was above the appeal of the intelligence. He had 
alwa3^s held passionately that the floor was immovable, and he 
always would. He had finally convinced himself of its omnipotent 
strength by the long process of assertion and reassertion. When a 
voice within him murmured that his belief in the floor had no 
scientific basis, he strangled the voice. So he remained, motionless, 
between the window and the machine. 



216 THE WORKER AND HIS WORK 

No sound! No slightest sound! No tremor of the machine! 
But Darius's breathing could be heard after a moment. 

He guffawed sneeringly. 

" And what next? " he defiantly asked, scowling. " What's amiss 
wi' ye all? " He put his hands in his pockets. " Dun ye mean 
to tell me as " 

The younger apprentice entered from the engine-shed. 

" Get back there! " rolled and thundered the voice of Big James. 
It was the first word he had spoken and he did not speak it in frantic, 
hysteric command, but with a terrible and convincing mildness! 
The phrase fell on the apprentice like a sandbag and he vanished. 

Darius said nothing. There was another cracking sound, louder, 
and unmistakably beneath the bed of the machine. And at the same 
instant a flake of grimy plaster detached itself from the opposite 
wall and dropped into pale dust on the floor. And still Darius 
religiously did not move, and Big James would not move. They 
might have been under a spell. The journeyman jumped down in- 
cautiously into the yard. 

IX 

And then Edwin, hardly knowing what he did, and certainly not 
knowing why he did it, walked quickly out on to the floor, seized the 
huge hook attached to the lower pulley of the tackle that hung from 
the roof-beam, pulled up the slack of the rope-bandage on the hind 
part of the machine and stuck the hook into it ; then walked quickly 
back. The hauling rope of the tackle had been carried to the iron 
ring of a trapdoor in the corner near Big James; this trapdoor, once 
the outlet of the interior staircase from the ground floor, had been 
nailed down many years previously. Big James dropped to his knees 
and tightened and knotted the rope. Another and much louder 
noise of cracking followed, the floor visibly yielded and the hind 
part of the machine visibly sank about a quarter of an inch. But 
no more. The tackle held. The strain was distributed between the 
beam above and the beam below, and equilibrium established. 

" Out! Lad! Out! " cried Darius feebly, in the wreck, not of 
his workshop but of his religion. And Edwin fled down the steps, 
pushing the mystified apprentices before him, and followed by the 
men. In the yard the journeyman, entirely self-centered, was hop- 
ping about on orfe leg and cursing. 



A PRINTING-OFFICE 217 



Darius, Big James and Edwin stared in the morning sunshine at 
the aperture of the window, and listened. 

" Nay! " said Big James after an eternity. " He's saved it! 
He's saved th' old shop! But by gum — ^by gum! " 

Darius turned to Edwin, and tried to say something; and then 
Edwin saw his father's face working into monstrous angular shapes, 
and saw the tears spurt out of his eyes; and was clutched con- 
vulsively in his father's shirt-sleeved arms. He was very proud, 
very pleased; but he did not like this embrace; it made him feel 
ashamed. And although he had incontestably done something which 
was very wonderful and very heroic, and which proved in him the 
most extraordinary presence of mind, he could not honestly glorify 
himself in his own heart, because it appeared to him that he had 
acted exactly like an automaton. He blankly marveled, and thought 
the situation agreeably thrilling, if somewhat awkward. His father 
let him go. Then all Edwin's feelings gave place to an immense 
stupefaction at his father^s truly remarkable behavior. What! His 
father emotional! He had to begin to revise again his settled views. 



IN THE QUARRIES 

By Eden Phillpotts 

Delabole is a hamlet created by one industry, whose men and 
boys to the number of five hundred work in the slate quarries, as 
their forefathers have done and their children's children will do. 
Since Tudor times the slate of Delabole has come to market, for 
men worked here before Shakespeare wrote. 

But the theatre of their toil is not immediately visible. 

Beneath Delabole an artificial mountain of shining stone rolls 
out upon the slope of the meadows, and creates a landmark to be 
seen for many miles. Behind these mounds the earth vanishes sud- 
denly, and there yawns an immense crater. It sinks below the sur- 
face of the land, and the mouth of it is more than a quarter of a 
mile across. Round about the pit stand offices, shops, and engine- 
houses. An iron structure ascends upon the landing-stage, or pappot- 
head, above a stark precipice of six hundred feet, and every way at 
the surface there threads and twists a network of little rails. They 
run round about to the shops, to the larger gauge of the main line, 
to the forehead of the mountains of waste stuff, whose feet are in the 
green fields far beneath. Here open the quarries of Delabole, and 
though they have been yielding slate for some hundred years, the 
supply continues to meet all demand. Of old a dozen separate 
workings stood in proximity; now they have run together, and their 
circumference is a mile. 

It is an oval cup with surfaces that slope outward from the bottom. 
The sides are precipices, some abrupt and beetling with sheer falls 
of many hundred feet, while others reveal a gentler declivity, and 
their sides are broken by giant steps. Here and there the over- 
burden has fallen in, and moraines of rubbish tower cone-shaped 
against the quarry sides. They spread from a point high up on the 
cliff face and ooze out in great wedges of waste, whose worthless 
masses smother good slate. The sides of the crater are chased with 
galleries, and burnished with bright colors spread and splashed over 
the planes of the cliffs. Some of these rock-cut galleries are now 
disused, others are bare and raw, with the bright thread of tram- 
218 



IN THE QUARRIES 219 

lines glittering along them; but in the neglected regions Nature has 
returned to weather the stone with wonderful color and trace rich 
harmonies of russet and amber upon it. Here, too, growing things 
have found foothold, and bird-borne, air-borne, water-borne seeds 
have germinated in the high crags and lonely workings. Saplings 
of ash, beech, and willow make shift to grow, and the rust of de- 
serted tramways or obsolete machinery is hidden under ferns and 
grasses and wild blossoms. To the east, where falling waters sheet a 
great red rock-surface, wakens the monkey-flower in springtime to 
fling a flash of gold amid the blues and grays, while elsewhere iron 
percolations and the drippings from superincumbent earth stain the 
sides of this great embouchure to a medley and mosaic of rich color. 
Evening fills the quarry with wine-purple that mounts to the brim 
as night falls upon it; dawn chases its sides with silver, and sunrise 
often floods it with red-gold. Sometimes, at seasons of autumnal 
rain, the cHffs spout white waterfalls that thread the declivities with 
foam and swell the tarn at the bottom; while in summer the sea 
mists find it, fill it, conceal the whole wonder of it, and muffle the 
din of the workers at the bottom. 

The active galleries wind away to present centers of attack, and 
terminate at the new-wrought and naked faces of the slate. These 
spots glitter steel-bright in contrast with the older workings. They 
open gray and blue where man's labor is fretting the face of the 
quarries at a dozen different points. Chief activity was now con- 
centrated upon the great " Grey Abbey " seam, under the northern 
precipice, and there labored two hundred men to blast the rock and 
fill the tumbrils that came and went. 

The great slate cup is full of light; it is gemmed and adorned so 
that no plane or scarp lacks beauty. On a bluff westward still stand 
half a dozen trees that bring spring green hither in April, and make 
a pillar of fire at autumn-time, until the shadows swallow them, or 
the winds that scour the quarry find their dead leaves and send them 
flying. Along the galleries that circle the sides of Old Delabole are 
sheds and pent-roofs, where a man may shelter against the hail of the 
blastings; while aloft, beside the trees on the knoll, stands a white- 
washed cottage, high above the bottom of the quarries, but far below 
their surface. Other dwellings once stood here, but they have vanished 
away for the sake of the good slate seams on which they stood. 
Now only Wilberforce Retallack's home remained, and that, too, with 



220 THE WORKER AND HIS WORK 

the cluster of trees beside it, was doomed presently to vanish. The 
house and its garden of flowers and shrubs might exist for a few 
more years, then it would follow its neighbors that once clustered 
beside it, like sea-birds' nests upon an ocean-facing crag. 

Beside the cottage there fell the great main entrance to the 
quarries — a steep plane of eight hundred feet that ran straight into 
the lowest depths and bore four main lines of tramway to the bottom, 
with other shorter lines that branched upon the sides. Up and down 
this great artery the little tumbrils ran. Steel ropes drew and lowered 
them. They rushed down swiftly, and slowly toiled up again laden 
with treasure or rubbish. 

Beneath the cottage, against a cliff that fell abruptly from, the 
edge of the foreman's garden, stood two great water-wheels, jutting 
from the rock, and a steam-pump also panted beside them. These 
fought the green-eyed tarn beneath and sucked away its substance, 
that it might not increase and drown the lowermost workings. At 
the bottom of all things it lay and stared up, like a lidless eye, from 
the heart of the cup. 

Besides the great plane that bore the chief business of the 
quarries and by which the rock-men descended and ascended from 
their work, there existed another means of lifting the stone and 
" deads " to the surface. From the pappot-head there slanted threads 
of steel to the " Grey Abbey " seams, and by these also the little 
trolleys came and went, or the great blocks swam aloft — a mass of a 
hundredweight flying upward, as lightly as down of thistles on a 
puff of air. To the earth they rose, then the flying waggons alighted 
upon the tram-lines, and a locomotive carried the trucks away. 

Against the cliff-faces these steel ropes stretch like gossamers, 
and behind them, upon the rosy and gray stone, light paints as on 
a canvas, and makes the quarry magical with sunshine and vapor, 
the shadows of clouds and rainbow colors after rain. From the 
pappot-head the immensity of the space beneath may be observed. 
Like mites in a ripe cheese the men move, and among them, shrunk 
to the size of black spiders, stand cranes and engines, and a great 
steam-shovel scooping debris from a fall. From these engines come 
puffs of white steam, and sometimes a steam- whistle squeaks. The 
din of work arises thinly, like hum and stridulation of insects; but 
Old Delabole is never silent. By day the blast and steam-whistle 
echo, and the noise of men, the quarryman's chant at his work, the 



IN THE QUARRIES 221 

chink of picks and tampers, the hiss of air-drills and chime of jack- 
daws cease not; while night knows an endless whispering and trickle 
of little sounds. Water forever tinkles through the darkness, and 
there is a murmur of moving earth and rustle of falling stone obeying 
the drag of gravitation through nocturnal silences. That iron law 
is written on more than senseless matter, for Delabole has its full 
story of human accident. You shall not walk through the streets 
without seeing maimed men who have lost an arm or leg in the 
battle, and the long years of quarry chronicle are punctuated by 
black-letter days of disaster and death. 

The rock-men are scattered everywhere — white, gray, and black. 
Now they combine to heave a block on a trolley, now they hang aloft 
on ropes or ladders, now they push the tumbrils to and from the 
cranes, now they control the engines and handle the great steam- 
shovel. Into a moraine it drives with a grinding crash, then strains 
upwards, and scoops a ton of rubbish at a thrust. Pick and shovel 
are at work everywhere. The long snakes of the air-drills twine 
down the quarry sides to fresh places of attack, and a distinctive, 
steady screech arises where their steel teeth gnaw holes into the 
rock, and the dust flies in little puffs. 

From time to time a whistle sounds, and the midgets take cover. 
From a pit or ledge the last man leaps hurriedly, having lighted 
a fuse before departing; then a billow of smoke bursts outward, 
and the ignition of black blasting-powder or dynamite rends the 
stubborn rock-face. First comes the roar of the explosion, then the 
crash and clatter of the falling stone — a sound like the cry of a reced- 
ing wave on some pebbly beach. The cup of the quarry catches and 
retains the din, reverberating its concussions round and round until 
they fade and die. 

The immensity of the quarries might well be marked from below. 
Over the green pool at the bottom of the pit there passed a trestle- 
bridge, and around it the space, that appeared shrunk to nothing 
when seen from above, spread out in some acres of apparent con- 
fusion and chaos. A village might have stood here. The main 
incline sloped upward like a mountain-side, and the whole bewilder- 
ing region was scored with glittering tram-lines on different planes, 
that ran hither and thither, rose and fell, and ended at the various 
centers and galleries where work progressed. The pappot-head tow- 
ered six hundred feet above on the western cliffs, and round about 



212 THE WORKER AND HIS WORK 

wheeled the amphitheatre of crags and precipices, now lifted in giant 
steps, now stark, now furrowed and wrinkled, and overhanging with 
threats of implicit peril. At this season much water was finding its 
way into the quarries, and the pool often rose a foot in a night. 
Many a rill spouted against the purple and olive sides of the slate, 
and from rifts and cracks in the quarry walls came threads of water. 
Elsewhere, over ledges and old workings, a thin rain of scattered tor- 
rents misted, and sometimes, when the low sun burned into the 
depths, it touched these vapors and set a rainbow there. Then the 
faces of the rock were transformed, and their wetness shone orange- 
tawny, gold, and crimson. One heard the eternal whisper and mur- 
mur of many waters, the clank of the pump, and the steady thud of 
the great water-wheels that sucked day and night at the tarn beneath 
them. The floods were drawn off by unseen ways through the side of 
the quarries, and the water was used aloft for the steam-engines 
that hoisted the slate from beneath and ran the machinery for cut- 
ting and dressing above. 

PART n 

The time was early autumn and the hour approaching noon. 

Suddenly Wilberforce Retallack, the foreman, stopped, bent his 
eyes on the earth, and started back as though he had been about 
to tread upon a snake. A layman's glance would have marked 
nothing but muddy soil and debris of stone scattered over it; but 
Retallack's eye saw more. He knelt down and started at what ap- 
peared to be a black hair stretched on the ground. So like a hair 
it looked, that he made sure it was not. Then he rose and, stooping 
low, quartered the cliff-top carefully for fifty yards, and left not a 
square foot of the surface unexamined. Two more of the hair-lines 
he found. They were disposed at a considerable distance from the 
first discover}^, and lay farther inward from the quarry edge. 

The man had gone purple in the face, partly from continued 
stooping and partly from the tremendous emotions excited by his 
discovery. His feet shook under him and his breathing became dif- 
ficult. He panted and sat down suddenly upon a shelf of slate, where 
the ground was broken by a two-foot step. For a moment he closed 
his eyes; then he opened them again, drew out a pocket-handker- 
chief, and mopped his wet brow. He looked round him, and his 
expression was dazed. He drew deep breaths that lifted his big 



IN THE QUARRIES 223 

chest; he stared blankly at the earth. The sound of blasting 
ascended from far below. First came the thunder of the explosion, 
then the hiss and rattle of falling stone, lastly the echo and reverbera- 
tion as the noise swept round the quarry and faintly died. The 
explosion aroused him, and he came to himself, stood up, and drew 
a whistle from his pocket. Thrice he blew it, and one of the " holla- 
boys " at the pappot-head marked him and ran to his bidding. 

" Get round to the landing-stage," he said, " and stop Mr. Tonkin 
and Mr. Nanjulian. They'll be coming up in a minute. And tell 
them I want them on the top of the ' Grey Abbey! ' " 

A steam-hooter announced noon as he spoke, and the boy ran 
off, to intercept Noah Tonkin and Retallack's colleague when they 
reached the surface. Five minutes later they came up in the same 
trolley, received their message, and proceeded to join Wilberforce 
where he stood on the cliff. Behind them, along a path beside the 
railway, strings of men were hastening away to dinner, and Wilber- 
force said nothing until they were gone. Then he spoke. 

" I can't trust myself to-day," he declared. " I'm not very well, 
and I've got private troubles on my mind. I'm hoping my eyes are 
out of order, and that I'm seeing what's not there. Just look this 
way, you two, and tell me if there's anything the matter with me, 
or if it's true." 

He had marked the hair-lines with stones, and now let Nanjulian 
and Tonkin see if they, too, observed them. They did. Then only 
in lesser degree than Retallack they exhibited their alarm. 

"My God! it's all up— it's 'good-bye,'" said Tonkin. "This 
means the end of the 'Grey Abbey'; and that means the end 
of Delabole! " 

To the older minds the tremendous discovery promised to put a 
period to their ancient industry; to Nanjulian, one of a younger 
generation, the impact of this discovery, while crushing enough, did 
not unman him. 

For the space of a week silence was kept respecting the pend- 
ing catastrophe; then the hair-lines had expanded and were a third 
of an inch across. They extended over a surface of seventy yards, 
and indicated pretty accurately the nature of the imminent disaster. 
The overburden of the quarry was coming in, and the fall was un- 
fortunately destined to submerge the " Grey Abbey " seam. Months 
might elapse before the landslip: Hawkey, the manager, gave it four 

i 



224 THE WORKER AND HIS WORK 

and Retallack calculated that it would take six; but the end was 
inevitable, and no physical powers within the control of man could 
have held up that enormous cliff-face. The greatest fall ever 
recorded in the history of Delabole was coming; but when it would 
come remained a matter of doubt. The writing on the earth might 
be expected to afford data and tell the nearer approach of the down- 
fall from week to week. 

There came a morning when, after examination of the cliffs, Tom 
Hawkey, Retallack, and Nanjulian decided that work beneath them 
must cease. Preparations had long been in hand for the approach- 
ing fall, and it was now judged that within a week or ten days the 
huge mass would come down. Ample margins of safety were, of 
course, allowed. The last stroke was struck, the last load of the 
famous " Grey Abbey " slate was drawn away. It seemed unlikely 
that the living generation would ever look upon these galleries again. 

One by one the steam-engines were drawn back from their places, 
and the cranes and great steam-shovel taken beyond reach of danger. 
The tram-rails were also pulled up and all appliances of value re- 
moved. Hawkey and Nanjulian devoted themselves to personal 
superintendence of this work, and the former calculated that the fall 
would cover an' expanse of not much less than fifty yards, and go 
far to fill the green lake at the bottom of the workings. Beyond this 
gulf it could not reach, though it was probable that single blocks 
and masses of stone precipitated from the great height of the cliffs 
might fly or ricochet to bombard a more extended area. For this 
reason all machinery was drawn back to the foot of the quarries; 
the steel ropes that fell to the foot of the " Grey Abbey " seams from 
the pappot-head were also cast loose and drawn out of harm's way. 

For some days the face of the rocks had begun to shed fragments. 
Here a load of earth slipped from above; here a ton of stone, its 
support removed, would descend, dragging lesser boulders with it. 
But now an abyss opened between solid earth and the tottering 
precipices. They looked as though the push of a child would fling 
them headlong, yet they weathered some nights of storm through 
which the village slumbered but little, for every man and woman ex- 
pected to hear the thunder of the falling cliff before dawn, and many 
slept not, but abode in the quarry to witness the tremendous spectacle, 
as far as a clouded moon would show it. 

Yet morning after morning found the cliffs still standing, and 



IN THE QUARRIES 225 

now daily the high ground above the quarries clear of the north face 
was crowded with people who lined each edge and waited, expecting 
that at any moment the end might come. Work was practically sus- 
pended now, and in the village itself all business appeared to be at 
a standstill save the business of eating and drinking. 

Then, on the actual day of the fall a spirit seemed to get into the 
air and an impulse drove Delabole to the quarries. It was contrary 
to nature that the precipice should longer stand. Night had seen a 
minor slip and the folk knew, without being told, that the end had 
come; they poured into the quarry and gathered along the terraces 
to the west and south, as though attending some great spectacle 
timed for a punctual hour. The workers lined the banks, and half 
the village accompanied them. 

Children were on the mounds and ledges above the quarry. They 
whistled and shouted and were from time to time cuffed and driven 
back into safety. 

The crowds increased and the best points of view were besieged. 
Pressure became exerted, and when a hundred tons of rock and earth 
suddenly fell from the forehead of the north face, the people, sup- 
posing the great spectacle about to begin, made a rush for certain 
points. On the open ground between the cliff edge and the office 
a great congestion occurred and the crowd swayed and massed. The 
awe and fear that had dominated so many minds in the past seemed 
strangely to have lifted, and here, in the shadow of the crisis, a 
cheerful spirit was apparent. An unconscious feeling that they were 
assembled at a show got hold upon them. The excitement of the 
actual demonstration for a time made them forget its significance, and 
not until afterwards did dread and despair reawaken. For the hour 
they were almost merry. Some sang and jested. Salutations passed, 
and men and women who had not met for months came together in 
the crowd and talked with animation of common friends and the 
events of their private lives. 

Suddenly a jagged rift, shaped like a flash of lightning, was torn 
across the face of the falling rocks. It appeared half-way up the 
precipice and began to widen as the stone slipped down. The sound 
of a low hissing accompanied this phenomenon; but it was not so 
loud as the murmur of the people. The rock slid down ; then a face 
of harder rock that slightly overhung the " Grey Abbey " seams with- 
stood the rush of it and cast it to the right and left as the bow of a 
15 



226 THE WORKER AND HIS WORK 

moving ship parts the water. In a gigantic ripple of earth and 
stone, with increasing roar the land slipped downward, and it seemed 
that an invisible finger broke the avalanche and cast it to the right 
and left. The precipices had not fallen and as yet no more than 
a huge mass of their lower planes was broken away. The sound of the 
descending stone was not so great as a dynamite explosion. 

" 'Tis no more than if the bottom of the cliff had rose up and sat 
down again! " cried Noah Tonkin. 

A cloud of dust rose thinly as the falling masses spread upon the 
bottom ; but it was not dense enough to conceal the workings. They 
were unhurt, and debris flowed in great rivers to the right and left, 
while a flood of stone and dust, thrown clear, as water over the apron 
of a fall, jumped the " Grey Abbey " and dropped into the green 
eye of the little tarn far beneath. 

The watchers could not believe their eyes. Inexperienced men 
laughed for joy. 

" Good fall! " " Good fall! " " All's right! " " Praise God! " 

Three hundred happy men lifted their voices, and some began to 
sing a hymn; while among the younger not a few started to descend. 
But Jack Keat at one point, Nanjulian at another, called them back. 

" You buffle-heads — ain't you got eyes? It's not down yet! " 
shaute.d Keat; and Hawkey from his standpoint also shouted to the 
men to come back. 

As yet no more than the foam of the wave had fallen. 

There was disorder; hope dwindled and the hymn ceased. Then 
fell more rock, and the great, solid, canopy of the " Grey Abbey " 
that had cast the first fall aside so easily and protected its precious 
trust, now seemed itself to move. It bellied, as though some im- 
prisoned monster were bursting through the solid rock; it crumpled 
and opened; then those stationed below the level of the quarry saw 
the horizon line of the north face change. At first it seemed to rise 
rather than fall and the entire surface of cliff lifted. The effect was 
terrific, and men said afterward that it looked as though the railway 
and the houses and the church, far behind them, must all inevitably 
follow. The cliff arched, like an enormous wave, and as spindrift 
bursts from the crest when a billow arches, so now, along the toppling 
land in its tremendous descent, much lighter matter leapt and fell. 
Clouds of stone and earth seemed to lift with a spring into the blue 
sky and sunshine, and to gleam along its crown for a second. Then 



IN THE QUARRIES 227 

the precipice arched and its own great purple shadow darkened its 
base. At first it seemed that the enormous bulk of stone would cross 
the breadth of the quarry to assail the galleries on the other side, and 
many beholders struggled back in unreasoning panic; but a moment 
later, as it sank and fell headfirst into the gulf below, the mass 
appeared to recede again and shrink into the depths that yawned 
to swallow it. For a few tremendous seconds the whole quarry face 
writhed and opened with rents and fissures all bursting downward. 
Light streamed upnDn it and no explosions or detonations marked the 
fall. It uttered the long-drav^m and deepening growl of a stormy 
sea heard afar off. The quarry was skinned to the bone and grit its 
teeth in agony. More cliff fell than any man had expected to fall, 
and the very bases of the world seemed shaken before such irre- 
sistible might. The earth lifted its murmur to heaven and the deso- 
lation was swiftly concealed by enormous volumes of dust that bil- 
lowed upward and ascended high above the beholders in a gray 
volume. The folds of it gleamed as the sun shone upon them, and the 
quarry was quite hidden, as an active volcano crater is concealed with 
smoke. The watchers could see no more, but through the murk 
there still came the murmur and groan of earth falling and settling 
and readjusting itself. 

There was no rush into the quarries now. The men feared the 
strange noises and invisible movements beneath them. They under- 
stood the ways of falling stone and knew that the pant and hiss and 
whistling from below meant a battle of rock masses beating and 
crushing and hurtling down upon each other, crashing together, rend- 
ing and grinding each other's faces, splitting and tearing and tumbling 
with increased speed where the splintered slopes were smoothed and 
ground clear by the downrush from above. The pant and growl of 
all this movement died slowly, and sometimes moments of profound 
stillness broke it. Then again it began and lifted and lulled, now 
dying, now deepening. It was as though in a great theatre, made dark 
for a moment, one heard the hurryings and tramplings of many feet 
changing the scene before light should again be throwii upon 
the stage. 

None of the thousand people who beheld this scene had witnessed 
or dreamed of such an event. It affected them differently and they 
increased its solemnity and grandeur by their presence. Some wept 
and here and there a woman clung to a man for comfort and found 



22S THE WORKER AND HIS WORK 

none. The majority of the men remained quite dumb before the 
spectacle. None cared to speak first. Then apprehension and under- 
standing returned; they came to themselves gradually as the solemn 
sounds died away beneath. 

They looked into each other's faces, and some laughed foolishly 
and some bragged that it was a poor show after all and they were 
going home to dinner. Hundreds prepared to rush into the quarry 
as soon as they could see their way and the clouds had thinned ; then, 
by a sort of simultaneous instinct, their eyes were turned upon Tom 
Hawkey, where he stood alone regarding the new face of the quarry 
now for the first time slowly limning through the sunlit dust. Every- 
body began to regard him; everybody began to suspend interest in 
the fall and to awake interest in him. This excitement increased mag- 
netically; pent feeling was poured into it; his attitude suddenly 
became a matter of profoundest interest. How was he looking? 
What was he feeling? In what direction, sanguine or hopeless, might 
opinion be guided by the spectacle of the manager and his view of the 
terrific thing that had happened? 

Such a wave of emotion could not be directed upon the man with- 
out his becoming conscious of it. It struck him home and he knew, 
without turning his head, that the people were regarding him. He 
must indicate something to them, inspire them, if possible, with an 
impulse of self-control, a message that all was not lost. He felt pro- 
foundly moved himself at the immensity of the event and could not 
as yet judge its full significance better than another. But apart from 
all that the catastrophe might mean, there was the actual, stupendous 
phenomenon itself. He had often pictured it and wondered what it 
would be like. And now it had come and transcended imagination 
and presented a spectacle of quickened natural forces that struck him 
as dumb as the rest. He contrasted the downfall of the north face 
with the dismay running through the midgets that beheld it ; and for 
a moment the immensity of moving matter and the awful disaster to 
the rocks swelled largest in his mind. So doubtless the earth was 
smitten in still mightier scale at times of earthquake and the eruption 
of her inner fires. Then he looked at the people and felt that not 
the chaos of rent stones, but the chaos of their hearts was the weighty 
matter ; not the new quarry presently to be revealed, but the men he 
led, who now, by some impulse that ran like a fire through their 
hearts, stared upon him and strove if possible to glean reflection of 



IN THE QUARRIES 229 

their fate from his bearing at this supreme moment. He stood for 
more than he guessed, yet knew that the eyes of many waited upon 
him in hope to win a spark of confidence, or in dread to be further 
cast down. The cloud had risen above all their heads from the quarry, 
and whereas before the sunshine lighted it, now it dimmed 
the sunshine. 

Hawkey's thoughts flashed quickly. There was no time to delay, 
and he felt called upon for some simple action or gesture. More than 
indifference was demanded. His inspiration took a shape so trifling 
that in narration it is almost ridiculous, though in fact it was not so. 
He drew a tobacco pipe and pouch from his pocket, loaded the pipe, 
lighted it, and cheered five hundred hearts. 

A wave of human feeling broke over the people. They cheered 
Tom Hawkey. Not a man knew why he expressed himself in this 
fashion; there existed no reason for doing so; but the act liberated 
breath and relaxed tension; so they did it and meant it. But he 
laughed and shook his head. 

" 'Tis for me to cheer you chaps! " he shouted. 

Then he joined them and the men began to pour down into the 
quarry. Soon only the old and women and children were left above. 
They gazed upon a new world as the dust-clouds slowly thinned away. 
The " Grey Abbey " seams had vanished under a million tons of earth. 
Perhaps no living eye would ever look upon them again. 



THE INCOMPARABLE ONION 

By Elizabeth Robins Pennell 

Too often the poet sees but the tears that live in an onion ; not the 
smiles. And yet the smiles are there, broad and genial, or subtle and 
tender. " Rose among roots," its very name revives memories of 
pleasant feasting; its fragrance is rich forecast of delights to come. 
Without it, there would be no gastronomic art. Banish it from the 
kitchen, and all pleasure of eating flies with it. Its presence lends 
color and enchantment to the most modest dish; its absence reduces 
the rarest dainty to hopeless insipidity, and the diner to despair. 

The secret of good cooking lies in the discreet and sympathetic 
treatment of the onion. For what culinary masterpiece is there that 
may not be improved by it? It gives vivacity to soup, life to sauce; 
it is the " poetic soul " of the salad bowl; the touch of romance in the 
well-cooked vegetable. To it, sturdiest joint and lightest stew, crisp 
rissole and stimulating stuffing look for inspiration and charm — and 
never are they disappointed! But woe betide the unwary woman 
who would approach it for sacrilegious ends. If life holds nothing 
better than the onion in the right hand, it offers nothing sadder and 
more degrading than the onion brutalized. Wide is the gulf fixed 
between the delicate sauce of a Prince de Soubise, and the coarse, 
unsavory sausage and onion mess of the Strand. Let the perfection 
of the first be your ideal; the horrid coarseness of the latter shun 
as you would the devil. 

The fragrance of this " wine-scented " esculent not only whets 
the appetite; it abounds in associations glad and picturesque. All 
Italy is in the fine, penetrating smell; and all Provence; and all 
Spain. An onion or garlic-scented atmosphere hovers alike over the 
narrow colli of Venice, the cool courts of Cordova, and the thronged 
amphitheatre of Aries. It is the only atmosphere breathed by the 
Latin peoples of the South, so that ever must it suggest blue skies and 
endless sunshine, cypress groves and olive orchards. For the traveler 
it is interwoven with memories of the golden canvases of Titian, the 
song of Dante, the music of Mascagni. The violet may not work 
a sweeter spell, nor the carnation yield a more intoxicating perfume. 
230 



THE INCOMPARABLE ONION 231 

And some men there have been in the past to rank the onion as 
a root sacred to Aphrodite: food for lovers. To the poetry of it 
none but the dull and brutal can long remain indifferent. 

Needless, then, to dwell upon its more prosaic side: upon its 
power as a tonic, its value as a medicine. Medicinal properties it 
has, as the drunkard knows full well. But why consider the drunkard? 
Leave him to the tender mercies of the doctor. Gourmandise, or the 
love of good eating, here the one and only concern, is opposed to 
excess. " Every man who eats to indigestion, or makes himself 
drunk, runs the risk of being erased from the list of its votaries." 

The onion is but the name for a large family, of which shallots, 
garlic, and chives are chief and most honored varieties. Moreover, 
country and cHmate work upon it changes many and strange. In 
the south it becomes larger and more opulent, like the women. And 
yet, as it increases in size, it loses in strength — who shall say why? 
And the loss truly is an improvement. Our own onion often is strong 
even unto rankness. Therefore, as all good housewives understand, 
the Spanish species for most purposes may be used instead, and great 
will be the gain thereby. Still further south, still further east, you 
will journey but to find the onion fainter in flavor, until in India it 
seems but a pale parody of its English prototype. And again, at 
different seasons, very different are its most salient qualities. In 
great gladness of heart everyone must look forward to the dainty 
little spring onion: adorable as vegetable cooked in good white sauce, 
inscrutable as guardian spirit of fresh green salad, irreproachable as 
pickle in vinegar and mustard. 

Garlic is one of the most gracious gifts of the gods to men — 3. 
gift, alas! too frequently abused. In the vegetable world, it has some- 
thing of the value of scarlet among colors, of the clarionet's call in 
music. Brazen, and crude, and screaming, when dragged into undue 
prominence, it may yet be made to harmonize divinely. with fish and 
fowl, with meat, and other greens. Thrown wholesale into a salad, 
it is odious and insupportable; but used to rub the salad bowl, and 
then cast aside, its virtue may not be exaggerated. For it, as for 
lovers, the season of seasons is the happy springtime. Its true home 
is Provence. What would be the land of the troubadour and the 
Felibre without the ail that festoons every green grocer's shop, that 
adorns every dish at every banquet of rich and poor alike? As well 
rid bouillabaisse of its saffron as of its ail; as well forget the pomme 



2Z1 THE WORKER AND HIS WORK 

d^ amour in the sauce for macaroniy or the rosemary and the thyme on 
the spit with the little birds. The verse of Roumanille and Mistral 
smells sweet of ail; Tartarin and Numa Roumestan are heroes nour- 
ished upon it. It is the very essence of faranddes and jerrades, of 
bull fights and water tournaments. A pinch of ail, a coup de vin, 
and then 

Viva la joia, 
Fidon la tristessa! 

And all the while we, in the cold, gloomy north, eat garlic and are 
hated for it by friends and foes. Only in the hot south can life ail — 
inspired pass for a galejado or jest. 

To the onion, the shallot is as the sketch to the finished picture; 
slighter, it may be; but often subtler and more suggestive. Unrivaled 
in salads and sauces, it is without compare in the sumptuous season- 
ing of the most fantastic viands. It does not assert itself with the 
fury and pertinacity of garlic ; it does not announce its presence with 
the self-consciousness of the onion. It appeals by more refined de- 
vices, by gentler means, and is to be prized accordingly. 

Small and brown, it is pleasant to look upon as the humble wild 
rose by the side of the Gloire de Dijon. And, though it never attain 
to the untempered voluptuousness of the onion, it develops its sweet- 
ness and strength under the hottest suns of summer: in July, August, 
and September, does it mature; then do its charms ripen; then may 
it be enjoyed in full perfection, and satisfy the most riotous gluttony. 

Shallots for summer by preference, but chives for spring: the 
delicate chives, the long, slim leaves, fair to look upon, sweet to smell, 
sweeter still to eat in crisp green salad. The name is a little poem; 
the thing itself falls not far short of the divine. Other varieties there 
be, other offshoots of the great onion — ^mother of all ; none, however, 
of greater repute, of wider possibilities than these. To know them 
well is to master the fundamental principles of the art of cookery. 
But this is knowledge given unto the few; the many, no doubt, will 
remain forever in the outer darkness, where the onion is condemned 
to everlasting companionship with the sausage — not altogether their 
fault, perhaps. In cookery, as in all else, too often the blind do lead 
the blind. But a few years since and a " delicate diner," an authority 
unto himself at least, produced upon the art of dining a book, not 



THE INCOMPARABLE ONION 22>Z 

without reputation. But to turn to its index is to find not one 
reference to the onion: all the poetry gone; little but prose left! And 
this from an authority! 

The onion, as a dish, is excellent; as seasoning it has still more 
pleasant and commodious merits. The modern chef uses it chiefly 
to season; the ancient cordon bleu set his wits to work to discover 
spices and aromatic ingredients wherewith to season it. Thus, accord- 
ing to Philemon, 

If you want an onion, just consider 

What great expense it takes to make it good: 

You must have cheese and honey, and sesame, 

Oil, leeks, and vinegar, and assafcetida. 

To dress it up with ; for by itself the onion 

Is bitter and unpleasant to the taste. 

A pretty mess, indeed ; and who is there brave enough to-day to test 
it? Honey and onion! it suggests the ingenious contrivances of the 
mediaeval kitchen. The most daring experiment now would be a dash 
of wine, red or white, a suspicion of mustard, a touch of tomato in the 
sauce for onions, stewed or boiled, baked or stuffed. To venture upon 
further flights of fancy the average cook would consider indiscreet, 
though to the genius all things are possible. However, its talents for 
giving savor and character to other dishes is inexhaustible. 

There is no desire more natural than that of knowledge ; there is 
no knowledge nobler than that of the " gullet-science.'* " The dis- 
covery of a new dish does more for the happiness of the human race 
than the discovery of a planet! " What would be Talleyrand's record 
but for that moment of inspiration when, into the mysteries of Par- 
mesan with soup, he initiated his countrymen? To what purpose the 
Crusades, had Crusaders not seen and loved the garlic on the plains of 
Askalctn, and brought it home with them, their one glorious trophy. 
To a pudding Richelieu gave his name ; the Prince de Soubise lent his 
to a sauce, and thereby won for it immortality. 

A benefactor to his race indeed he was: worthy of a shrine in the 
Temple of Humanity. For, plucking the soul from the onion, he laid 
bare its hidden and sweetest treasure to the elect. Scarce a sauce is 
served that owes not fragrance and flavor to the wine-scented root; 
to it, Bcarnaise, Maitre d'Hotel, Espagnole, Italienne, Bechamel, 



234 THE WORKER AND HIS WORK 

Provengale, and who shall say how many more? look for the last 
supreme touch that redeems them from insipid commonplace. But 
Sauce Soubise is the very idealization of the onion, its very essence; 
at once delicate and strong; at once as simple and as perfect as all 
great works of art. 

The plodding painter looks upon a nocturne by Whistler, and 
thinks how easy, how preposterously easy! A touch here, a stroke there, 
and the thing is done. But let him try! And so with Sauce Soubise. 
Turn to the first cookery book at hand, and read the recipe. '' Peel 
four large onions and cut them into thin slices; sprinkle a little 
pepper and salt upon them, together with a small quantity of nutmeg; 
put them into a saucepan with a slice of fresh butter, and steam 
gently " — ^let them smile, the true artist would say — " till they are 
soft." But why go on with elaborate directions? Why describe the 
exact quantity of flour, the size of the potato, the proportions of milk 
and cream to be added? Why explain in detail the process of rub- 
bing through a sieve? In telling or the reading these matters seem 
not above the intelligence of a little child. But in the actual making, 
only the artist understands the secret of perfection, and his under- 
standing is bom within him, not borrowed from dry statistics and 
formal tables. He may safely be left to vary his methods; he may 
add sugar, he may omit nutmeg; he may fry the onions instead of 
boiling, for love of the tinge of brown, rich and somber, thus obtained. 
But, whatever he does, always with a wooden spoon will he stir his 
savory mixture; always, as result, produce a godlike sauce which 
the mutton cutlets of Paradise, vying with Heine's roast goose, will 
offer of their own accord at celestial banquets. What wonder that 
a certain famous French count despised the prosaic politician who 
had never heard of cutlets a la Soubise! 

However, not alone in sauce can the condescending onion come to 
the aid of dull, substantial flesh and fowl. Its virtue, when joined to 
sage in stuffing, who will gainsay? Even chestnuts, destined to stuff 
to repletion the yawning turkey, cannot afford to ignore the insinuat- 
ing shallot or bolder garlic; while no meat comes into the market 
that will not prove the better and the sweeter for at least a suspicion 
of onion or of ail. A barbarian truly is the cook who flings a mass 
of fried onions upon the tender steak, and then thinks to offer you 
a rare and dainty dish. Not with such wholesale brutality can the 
ideal be attained. The French chef has more tact. He will take his 



THE INCX)MPARABLE ONION 235 

gigot and sympathetically prick it here and there with garlic or with 
chives, even as it is roasting; and whoever has never tasted mutton 
thus prepared knows not the sublimest heights of human happiness. 
Or else he will make a bouquet garni of his own, entirely of these 
aromatic roots and leaves, and fasten it in dainty fashion to the joint; 
pleasure is doubled when he forgets to remove it, and the meat is 
placed upon the table, still bearing its delicious decoration. Moods 
there be that call for stronger effects: moods when the blazing poppy 
field of a Monet pleases more than the quiet moonlight of a Cazin; 
when Tennyson is put aside for Swinburne. At such times, call for 
a shoulder of mutton, well stuffed with onions, and still further satiate 
your keen, vigorous appetite with a bottle of Beaune or Pomard. But 
here, a warning; eat and drink with at least a pretence of moderation. 
Remember that, but for an excess of shoulder of mutton and onions, 
Napoleon might not have been defeated at Leipzig. 

But at all times, and in all places, onions clamor for moderation. 
A salad of tomatoes buried under thick layers of this powerful esculent 
must disgust; gently sprinkled with chopped-up chives or shallots, it 
enraptures. Potatoes a la Lyonnaise, curried eggs, Irish stew, Gulyas, 
ragout, alike demand restraint in their preparation, a sweet reason- 
ableness in the hand that distributes the onion. 

For the delicate diner, as for the drunkard, onion soup has charm. 
It is of the nature of sauce Soubise, and what mightier recommenda- 
tion could be given it? Thus Dumas, the high priest of the kitchen, 
made it : a dozen onions — Spanish by preference^ — minced with discre- 
tion, fried in freshest of fresh butter until turned to a fair golden 
yellow, he boiled in three pints or so of water, adequately seasoned 
with salt and pepper; and then, at the end of twenty full minutes, he 
mixed with this preparation the yolks of two or three eggs, and poured 
the exquisite liquid upon bread, cut and ready. At the thought alone 
the mouth waters, the eye brightens. The adventurous, now and again, 
add ham or rice, vegetables or a bouquet garni. But this as you will, 
according to the passing hour's leisure. Only of one thing make 
sure — in Dumas confidence is ever to be placed without doubt 
or hesitation. 

Dumas^ soup for dinner ; but for breakfast the unrivalled omelette 
of Brillat-Savarin. It is made after this fashion: the roes of two carp, 
a piece of fresh tunny, and shallots, well hashed and mixed, are 
thrown into a saucepan with a lump of butter beyond reproach, and 



236 THE WORKER AND HIS WORK 

whipped up till the butter is melted, which, says the great one, " con- 
stitutes the specialty of the omelette "; in the meantime, let some one 
prepare, upon an oval dish, a mixture of butter and parsley, lemon 
juice, and chives — not shallots here, let the careless note — the plate 
to be left waiting over hot embers ; next beat up twelve eggs, pour in 
the roes and tunny, stir with the zeal and sympathy of an artist, spread 
upon the plate that waits so patiently, serve at once; and words fail 
to describe the ecstasy that follows. Especially, to quote again so 
eminent an authority, let the omelette " be washed down with some 
good old wine, and you will see wonders," undreamed of by hashish 
or opium eater. 

When the little delicate spring onion is smelt in the land, a shame, 
indeed, it would be to waste its tender virginal freshness upon sauce 
and soup. Rather refrain from touching it with sharp knife or cruel 
chopper, but in its graceful maiden form boil it, smother it in rich 
pure cream, and serve it on toast, to the unspeakable delectation of 
the devout. Life yields few more precious moments. Until spring 
comes, however, you may do worse than apply the same treatment to 
the older onion. In this case, as pleasure's crown of pleasure, adorn 
the surface with grated Gruyere, and, like the ancient hero, you will 
wish your throat as long as a crane's neck, that so you might the longer 
and more leisurely taste what you swallow. 

Onions farcis are beloved by the epicure. A nobler dish could 
scarce be devised. You may make your forcemeats of what you will, 
beef or mutton, fowl or game; you may, an you please, add truffles, 
mushrooms, olives, and capers. But know one thing: tasteless it will 
prove, and lifeless, unless bacon lurk unseen somewhere within its 
depths. Ham will answer in a way, but never so well as humbler 
bacon. The onion that lends itself most kindly to this device is 
the Spanish. 

One word more. As the ite missa est of the discourse let this 
truth — a blessing in itself — be spoken. As with meat, so with vege- 
tables, few are not the better for the friendly companionship of the 
onion, or one of its many offshoots. Peas, beans, tomatoes, egg-plant 
are not indifferent to its blandishments. If honor be paid to the first 
pig that uprooted a truffle, what of the first man who boiled an onion? 
And what of the still mightier genius who first used it as seasoning 
for his daily fare? Every gourmet should rise and call him blessed. 



SWEET DAY OF REST 

By Eliza Calvert Hall 

I WALKED slowly down the " big road " that Sunday afternoon — 
slowly, as befitted the scene and the season; for who would hurry 
over the path that summer has prepared for the feet of earth's tired 
pilgrims? It was the middle of June, and Nature lay a vision of 
beauty in her vesture of flowers, leaves, and blossoming grasses. 
The sandy road was a pleasant walking-place; and if one tired of 
that, the short, thick grass on either side held a fairy path, fragrant 
with pennyroyal, that most virtuous of herbs. A tall hedge of Osage 
orange bordered each side of the road, shading the traveler from the 
heat of the sun, and furnishing a nesting-place for numberless small 
birds that twittered and chirped their joy in life and love and June. 
Occasionally a gap in the foliage revealed the placid beauty of corn, 
oats, and clover, stretching in broad expanse to the distant purple 
woods, with here and there a field of the cloth of gold — the fast- 
ripening wheat that waited the hand of the mower. Not only is it the 
traveler's manifest duty to walk slowly in the midst of such sur- 
roundings, but he will do well if now and then he sits down and dreams. 
As I made the turn in the road and drew near Aunt Jane's house, 
I heard her voice, a high, sweet, quavering treble, like the notes of an 
ancient harpsichord. She was singing a hymn that suited the day 
and the hour: 

"Welcome, sweet day of rest, 

That saw the Lord arise, 
Welcome to this rejoicing breast. 

And these rejoicing eyes." 

Mingling with the song I could hear the creak of her old splint- 
bottomed chair as she rocked gently to and fro. Song and creak 
ceased at once when she caught sight of me, and before I had opened 
the gate she was hospitably placing another chair on the porch and 
smiling a welcome. 

From Aunt Jane of Kentucky, by Eliza Calvert Hall. Copyright, 1907, 
by Little, Brown & Co. 

237 



238 THE WORKER AND HIS WORK 

" Come in, child, and set down," she exclaimed, moving the rocker 
so that I might have a good view of the bit of landscape that she 
knew I loved to look at. 

" Pennyroy'l! Now, child, how did you know I love to smell 
that? " She crushed the bunch in her withered hands, buried her 
face in it and sat for a moment with closed eyes. " Lord! Lord! " 
she exclaimed, with deep-drawn breath, " if I could jest tell how that 
makes me feel ! I been smellin' pennyroy'l all my life, and now, when 
I get hold of a piece of it, sometimes it makes me feel like a little 
child, and then again it brings up the time when I was a gyirl, and 
if I was to keep on settin' here and rubbin' this pennyroy'l in my 
hands, I believe my whole life'd come back to me. Honeysuckles 
and pinks and roses ain't any sweeter to me. Me and old Uncle 
Harvey Dean was just alike about pennyroy'l. Many a time I've seen 
Uncle Harvey searchin' around in the fence comers in the early part 
o' May to see if the pennyroy'l was up yet, and in pennyroy'l time you 
never saw the old man that he didn't have a bunch of it somewheres 
about him. Aunt Maria Dean used to say there was dried penny- 
roy'l in every pocket of his coat, and he used to put a big bunch of it 
on his piller at night. Sundays it looked like Uncle Harvey couldn't 
enjoy the preachin' and the singin' unless he had a sprig of it in his 
hand, and I ricollect once seein' him git up durin' the first prayer 
and tiptoe out o' church and come back with a handful o' pennyroy'l 
that he'd gethered across the road, and he'd set and smell it and look 
as pleased as a child with a piece o' candy." 

" Piercing sweet " the breath of the crushed wayside herb rose 
on the air. I had a distinct vision of Uncle Harvey Dean, and won- 
dered if the fields of asphodel might not yield him some small harvest 
of his much-loved earthly plant, or if he might not be drawn earth- 
ward in " pennyroy'l time." 

" I was jest settin' here restin'," resumed Aunt Jane, " and thinkin' 
about Milly Amos. I reckon you heard me singin' fit to scare the 
crows as you come along. We used to call that Milly Amos' hymn, 
and I never can hear it without thinkin' o' Milly." 

" Why was it Milly Amos' hymn? " I asked. 

Aunt Jane laughed blithely. 

" La, child! " she said, " don't you ever get tired o' my yarns? 
Here it is Sunday, and you tryin' to git me started talkin'; and when 
I git started you know there ain't no tellin' when I'll stop. Come 



SWEET DAY OF REST 239 

on and le's look at the gyarden; that's more fittin' for Sunday evenin' 
than tellin' yarns." 

So together we went into the garden and marveled happily over 
the growth of the tasseling corn, the extraordinarily long runners on 
the young strawberry plants, the size of the green tomatoes, and all 
the rest of the miracles that sunshine and rain had wrought since my 
last visit. 

The first man and the first woman were gardeners, and there is 
something wrong in any descendant of theirs who does not love a gar- 
den. He is lacking in a primal instinct. But Aunt Jane was in this 
respect a true daughter of Eve, a faithful coworker with the sun- 
shine, the winds, the rain, and all other forces of nature. 

" What do you reckon folks'd do," she inquired, " if it wasn't for 
plantin'-time and growin'-time and harvest-time? I've heard folks 
say they was tired o' livin', but as long as there's a gyarden to be 
planted and looked after there's somethin' to live for. And unless 
there's gyardens in heaven I'm pretty certain I ain't goin' to be sat- 
isfied there." 

But the charms of the garden could not divert me from the main 
theme, and when we were seated again on the front porch I returned 
to Milly Amos and her hymn. 

" You know," I said, " that there isn't any more harm in talking 
about a thing on Sunday than there is in thinking about it." And 
Aunt Jane yielded to the force of my logic. 

" I reckon you've heard me tell many a time about our choir," 
she began, smoothing out her black silk apron with fingers that evi- 
dently felt the need of knitting or some other form of familiar work. 
" John Petty was the bass, Sam Crawford the tenor, my Jane was the 
alto, and Milly Amos sung soprano. I reckon Milly might 'a' been 
called the leader of the choir; she was the sort o' woman that generally 
leads wherever she happens to be, and she had the strongest, finest 
voice in the whole congregation. All the parts appeared to depend 
on her, and it seemed like her voice jest carried the rest o' the voices 
along like one big river that takes up all the little rivers and carries 
'em down to the ocean. I used to think about the difference between 
her voice and Miss Penelope's. Milly's was jest as clear and true 
as Miss Penelope's, and four or five times as strong, but I'd ruther 
hear one note o' Miss Penelope's than a whole song o' Milly's. 
Milly's was jest a voice, and Miss Penelope's was a voice and some- 



240 THE WORKER AND HIS WORK 

thin' else besides, but what that somethin' was I never could say. 
However, Milly was the very one for a choir; she kind o' kept 'em 
all together and led 'em along, and we was mighty proud of our choir 
in them days. We always had a voluntary after we got our new organ, 
and I used to look forward to Sunday on account o' that voluntary. 
It used to sound so pretty to hear 'em begin singin' when everything 
was still and solemn, and I can never forgit the hymns they sung 
then — Sam and Milly and John and my Jane. 

" But there was one Sunday when Milly didn't sing. Her and 
Sam come in late, and I knew the minute I set eyes on Milly that 
somethin' was the matter. Generally she was smilin^ and bowin' to 
people all around, but this time she walked in and set the children 
down, and then set down herself without even lookin' at anybody, 
to say nothin' o' smilin' or speakin'. Well, when half-past ten come, 
my Jane began to play ' Welcome, sweet day of rest,' and all of 'em 
begun singin' except Milly. She set there with her mouth tight shut, 
and let the bass and tenor and alto have it all their own way. I 
thought maybe she was out o' breath from comin' in late and in a 
hurry, and I looked for her to jine in, but she jest set there, lookin' 
straight ahead of her; and when Sam passed her a hymn-book, she 
took hold of it and shut it up and let it drop in her lap. And there 
was the tenor and the bass and the alto doin' their best, and every- 
body laughin', or tryin' to keep from laughin'. I reckon if Uncle 
Jim Matthews had 'a' been there, he'd 'a' took Milly 's place and helped 
'em- out, but Uncle Jim'd been in his grave more'n two years. Sam 
looked like he'd go through the floor, he was so mortified, and he 
kept lookin' around at Milly as much as to say, ' Why don't you 
sing? Please sing, Milly,' but Milly never opene^i her mouth. 

"I'd about concluded Milly must have the sore throat or 
somethin' like that, but when the first hymn was give out, Milly 
started in and sung as loud as anybody; and when the doxology come 
around, Milly was on hand again, and everybody was settin' there 
wonderin' why on earth Milly hadn't sung in the voluntary. When 
church was out, I heard Sam invitin' Brother Hendricks to go home 
and take dinner with him — Brother Hendricks'd preached for us that 
day — and they all drove off together before I'd had time to speak 
to Milly. 

" But that week, when the Mite Society met, Milly was there 
bright and early; and when we'd all got fairly started with our 



SWEET DAY OF REST 241 

sewin^, and everybody was in a good humor, Sally Ann says, says 
she: ' Milly, I want to know why you didn't sing in that voluntary 
Sunday. I reckon everybody here wants to know,' says she, ' but 
nobody but me's got the courage to ask you.' 

" And Milly 's face got as red as a beet, and she burst out laughin', 
and says she: 'I declare, I'm ashamed to tell you all. I reckon Satan 
himself must 'a^ been in me last Sunday. You know,' says she, 
* there's some days when everything goes wrong with a woman, and 
last Sunday was one o' them days. I got up early,' says she, ^ and 
dressed the children and fed my chickens and strained the milk and 
washed up the milk things and got breakfast and washed the dishes 
and cleaned up the house and gethered the vegetables for dinner 
and washed the children's hands and faces and put their Sunday 
clothes on 'em, and jest as I was startin' to git myself ready for 
church,' says she, ' I happened to think that I hadn't skimmed the 
milk for the next day's churnin'. So I went down to the spring- 
house and did the skimmin', and jest as I picked up the cream-jar 
to put it up on that shelf Sam built for me, my foot slipped,' says 
she, ' and down I come and skinned my elbow on the rock step, and 
broke the jar all to smash and spilled the cream all over creation, 
and there I was — four pounds o' butter and a fifty-cent jar gone, 
and my springhouse in such a mess that I ain't through cleanin' it 
yet, and my right arm as stiff as a poker ever since.' 

" We all had to laugh at the way Milly told it; and Sally Ann 
says, * Well, that was enough to make a saint mad.' * Yes,' says 
Milly, ' and you all know I'm far from bein' a saint. However,' 
says she, ' I picked up the pieces and washed up the worst o' the 
cream, and then I went to the house to git myself ready for church, 
and before I could git there, I heard Sam hollerin' for me to come 
and sew a button on his shirt; one of 'em had come off while he was 
tryin' tO button it. And when I got out my work-basket, the children 
had been playin' with it, and there wasn't a needle in it, and my 
thimble was gone, and I had to hunt up the apron I was makin' 
for little Sam and git a needle off that, and I run the needle into my 
finger, not havin' any thimble, and got a blood spot on the bosom 
o' the shirt. Then,' says she, ' before I could git my dress over my 
head, here come little Sam with his clothes all dirty where he'd fell 
down in the mud, and there I had him to dress again, and that made 
me madder still; and then, when I finally got out to the wagon/ 
16 



242 THE WORKER AND HIS WORK 

says she, ' I rubbed my clean dress against the wheel, and that made 
me mad again; and the nearer we got to the church, the madder I 
was; and now,^ says she, ^ do you reckon after all I'd been through 
that mornin', and dinner ahead of me to git, and the children to look 
after all the evenin', do you reckon that I felt like settin' up there and 
singin' " Welcome, sweet day of rest "? ' Says she, ' I ain't seen any 
day o' rest since the day I married Sam, and I don't expect to see 
any till the day I die; and if Parson Page wants that hymn sung, 
let him git up a choir of old maids and old bachelors, for they're the 
only people that ever see any rest Sunday or any other day.' 

" We all laughed, and said we didn't blame Milly a bit for not 
singin' that hymn ; and then Milly said : ' I reckon I might as well 
tell you all the whole story. By the time church was over,' says she, 
' I'd kind of cooled off, but when I heard Sam askin' Brother Hen- 
dricks to go home and take dinner with him, that made me mad 
again ; for I knew that meant a big dinner for me to cook, and I 
made up my mind then and there that I wouldn't cook a blessed 
thing, company or no company. Sam'd killed chickens the night 
before,' says she, ' and they was all dressed and ready, down in the 
springhouse; and the vegetables was right there on the back porch, 
but I never touched 'em,' says she. ' I happened to have some cold 
ham and cold mutton on hand — not much of either one — and I sliced 
'em and put the ham in one end o' the big meat-dish and the mutton 
in the other, with a big bare place between, so's everybody could see 
that there wasn't enough of either one to go 'round; and then,' says 
she, ' I sliced up a loaf o' my salt-risin' bread and got out a bowl o' 
honey and a dish o' damson preserves, and then I went out on the 
porch and told Sam that dinner was ready.' 

" I never shall forgit how we all laughed when Milly was tellin' 
it. ' You know. Aunt Jane,' says she, ' how quick a man gits up 
when you tell him dinner's ready. Well, Sam he jumps up, and says 
he, " Why, you're mighty smart to-day, Milly; I don't believe there's 
another woman in the county that could git a Sunday dinner this 
quick." And says he, " Walk out, Brother Hendricks, walk 
right out." ' " 

Here Aunt Jane paused to laugh again at the long-past scene 
that her words called up. 

" Milly used to say that Sam's face changed quicker'n a flash o' 
lightnin' when he saw the table, and he dropped down in his cheer 



SWEET DAY OF REST 243 

and forgot to ask Brother Hendricks to say grace. ' Why, Milly,' 
says he, ' where's the dinner? Where's them chickens I killed last 
night and the potatoes and corn and butter-beans? ' And Milly 
jest looked him square in the face, and says she, ' The chickens are 
in the springhouse and the vegetables out on the back porch, and,' 
says she, ' do you suppose I'm goin' to cook a hot dinner for you all 
on this " sweet day o' rest "? ' " 

Aunt Jane stopped again to laugh. 

" That wasn't a polite way for anybody to talk at their own 
table," she resumed, " and some of us asked Milly what Brother 
Hendricks said. And Milly's face got as red as a beet again, and 
she says : ' Why, he behaved so nice, he made me feel right ashamed 
o^ myself for actin' so mean. He jest reached over and helped himself 
to everything he could reach, and says he, '' This dinner may not 
suit you. Brother Amos, but it's plenty good for me, and jest the 
kind I'm used to at home." Says he, " I'd rather eat a cold dinner 
any time than have a woman toilin' over a hot stove for me." ' And 
when he said that, Milly up and told him why it was she didn't 
feel like gittin' a hot dinner, and why she didn't sing in the volun- 
tary; and when she'd got through, he says, ^ Well, Sister Amos, if 
I'd been through all you have this momin' and then had to git up 
and give out such a hymn as " Welcome, sweet day o' rest," I believe 
I'd be mad enough to pitch the hymn-book and the Bible at the 
deacons and the elders.' And then he turns around to Sam, and 
says he, ' Did you ever think. Brother Amos, that there ain't a 
pleasure men enjoy that women don't have to suffer for it? ' And 
Milly said that made her feel meaner'n ever; and when supper-time 
come, she lit the fire and got the best hot supper she could — fried 
chicken and waffles and hot soda-biscuits and coffee and goodness 
knows what else. Now wasn't that jest like a woman, to give in 
after she'd had her own way for a while and could 'a' kept on havin' 
it? Abram used to say that women and runaway horses was jest 
alike: the best way to manage 'em both was to give 'em the rein 
and let 'em go till they got tired, and they'll always stop before they 
do any mischief. Milly said that supper tickled Sam pretty near 
to death. Sam was always mighty proud o' Milly's cookin\ 

" So that's how we come to call that hymn Milly Amos' hymn, 
and as long as Milly lived folks'd look at her and laugh whenever 
the preacher give out * Welcome, sweet day o' rest.' " 



244 THE WORKER AND HIS WORK 

The story was over. Aunt Jane folded her hands, and we both 
surrendered ourselves to happy silence. All the faint, sweet sounds 
that break the stillness of a Sunday in the country came to our ears 
in gentle symphony — the lisp of the leaves, the chirp of young 
chickens lost in the mazes of billowy grass, and the rustle of the 
silver poplar that turned into a mass of molten silver whenever 
the breeze touched it. 

" When you've lived as long as I have, child," said Aunt Jane 
presently, " you'll feel that you've lived in two worlds. A short 
life don't see many changes, but in eighty years you can see old 
things passin' away and new ones comin' on to take their place, 
and when I look back at the way Sunday used to be kept and the 
way it's kept now, it's jest Hke bein' in another world. I hear folks 
talkin' about how wicked the world's growin' and wishin' they could 
go back to the old times, but it looks like to me there's jest as much 
kindness and goodness in folks nowadays as there was when I was 
young; and as for keepin' Sunday, why, I've noticed all my life that 
the folks that's strictest about that ain't always the best Christians, 
and I reckon there's been more foolishness preached and talked 
about keepin' the Sabbath day holy than about any other one thing. 

" I ricollect some fifty-odd years ago the town folks got to keepin' 
Sunday mighty strict. They hadn't had a preacher for a long time, 
and the church'd been takin' things easy, and finally they got a 
new preacher from down in Tennessee, and the first thing he did 
was to draw the lines around 'em close and tight about keqpin' Sun- 
day. Some o' the members had been in the habit o' havin' their 
wood chopped on Sunday. Well, as soon as the new preacher come, 
he said that Sunday wood-choppin' had to cease amongst his church- 
members or he'd have 'em up before the session. I ricollect old 
Judge Morgan swore he'd have his wood chopped any day that 
suited him. And he had a load o' wood carried down cellar, and the 
colored mari chopped all day long down in the cellar, and nobody 
ever would 'a' found it out, but pretty soon they got up a big 
revival that lasted three months and spread 'way out into the country, 
and bless your life, old Judge Morgan was one o' the first to be 
converted; and when he give in his experience, he told about the 
wood-choppin', and how he hoped to be forgiven for breakin' the 
Sabbath day. 

" Well, of course, us people out in the country wouldn't be out- 



SWEET DAY OF REST 245 

done by the town folks, so Parson Page got up and preached on the 
Fourth Commandment and all about that pore man that was stoned to 
death for pickin' up a few sticks on the seventh day. And Sam Amos, 
he says after meetin' broke, says he, ' It's my opinion that that man 
was a industrious, enterprisin' feller that was probably pickin' up 
kindlin'-wood to make his wife a fire, and,' says he, ' if they wanted 
to stone anybody to death they better 'a' picked out some lazy, 
triflin' feller that didn't have energy enough to work Sunday or 
any other day.' Sam always would have his say, and nothin' pleased 
him better'n to talk back to the preachers and git the better of 'em in 
a argument. I ricoUect us women talked that sermon over at the 
Mite Society, and Maria Petty says: * I don't know but what it's a 
wrong thing to say, but it looks to me like that Commandment wasn't 
intended for anybody but them Israelites. It was mighty easy for 
them to keep the Sabbath day holy, but,' says she, ' the Lord don't 
rain down manna in my yard. And,' says she, ' men can stop plowin' 
and plantin' on Sunday, but they don't stop eatin', and as long as 
men have to eat on Sunday, women'll have to work.' 

" And Sally Ann, she spoke up, and says she, ' That's so; and 
these very preachers that talk so much about keepin' the Sabbath 
day holy, they'll walk down out o' their pulpits and set down at some 
woman's table and eat fried chicken and hot biscuits and com bread 
and five or six kinds of vegetables, and never think about the work 
it took to git the dinner, to say nothin' o' the dish-washin' to 
come after.' 

"There's one thing, child, that I never told to anybody but Abram; 
I reckon it was wicked, and I ought to be ashamed to own it, but " — 
here her voice fell to a confessional key — " I never did like Sunday 
till I begun to git old. And the way Sunday used to be kept, it looks 
to me like nobody could 'a' been expected to like it but old folks 
and lazy folks. You see, I never was one o' these folks that's born 
tired. I loved to work. I never had need of any more rest than I 
got every night when I slept, and I woke up every mornin' ready 
for the day's work. I hear folks prayin' for rest and wishin' for rest, 
but, honey, all my prayer was, ' Lord, give me work, and strength 
enough to do it.' And when a person looks at all the things there is 
to be done in this world, they won't feel like restin' when they 
ain't tired. 

" Abram used to say he believed I tried to make work for myself 



246 THE WORKER AND HIS WORK 

Sunday and every other day; and I ricollect I used to be right glad 
when any o' the neighbors'd git sick on Sunday and send for me 
to help nurse 'em. Nursing the sick was a work o' necessity, and 
mercy, too. And then, child, the Lord don't ever rest. The Bible 
says He rested on the seventh day when He got through makin' the 
world, and I reckon that was rest enough for Him. For, jest look; 
everything goes on Sundays jest the same as week-days. The grass 
grows, and the sun shines, and the wind blows, and He does it all." 

"'For still the Lord is Lord of might; 
In deeds, in deeds Hej takes delight,' " 
I said. 

"That's it," said Aunt Jane, delightedly. "There ain't any 
religion in restin' unless you're tired, and work's jest as holy in His 
sight as rest." 

Our faces were turned toward the western sky, where the sun 
was sinking behind the amethystine hills. The swallows were darting 
and twittering over our heads, a somber flock of blackbirds rose from 
a huge oak tree in the meadow across the road, and darkened the 
sky for a moment in their flight to the cedars that were their nightly 
resting place. Gradually the mist changed from amethyst to rose, 
and the poorest object shared in the transfiguration of the 
sunset hour. 

Is it unmeaning chance that set man's days, his dusty, common 
days, between the glories of the rising and the setting sun, and his 
life, his dusty, common life, between the two solemnities of birth and 
death? Bounded by the splendors of the morning and evening 
skies, what glory of thought and deed should each day hold! What 
celestial dreams and vitalizing sleep should fill our nights! For why 
should day be more magnificent than life? 

As we watched in understanding silence, the enchantment slowly 
faded. The day of rest was over, a night of rest was at hand; and 
in the shadowy hour between the two hovered the benediction of that 
peace which " passeth all understanding." 



IVY OF THE NEGATIVES 

By Margaret Lynn 

Maldy was away for the afternoon. That was a very rare thing, 
for Maldy clung to the place as if it were a citadel left to her guard- 
ing. She held all visiting in contempt — partly because of her own 
long experience with visitors — and as for her scanty shopping, she 
summarily relegated that to my mother, her only requirements in 
garments being that they should wear well and should look just 
like her last ones. But at one point my mother demurred. She 
would not buy Maldy 's shoes — so she said after a few experiments — 
and have her hobbling around in toe-pinching or heel-rubbing foot- 
leather. So twice a year, after Maldy's needs had for many days 
been pointed out to her, she, with many postponements and great 
final reluctance, went to town with my mother. This was one of 
those occasions. 

She had looked back many times before she was out of sight, and 
we, out of sheer kindliness to her, had maintained a virtuous state 
of conspicuous idleness on the front porch as long as she could see 
us. It would be a comforting vision for her to carry with her to the 
unacceptable experiences of the afternoon. 

With Maldy out of sight and a change of atmosphere, we im- 
mediately relaxed. Meditation fell upon us. We were not really 
casting about for anything lawless to do ; but still so rare an occasion 
as this deserved some unwonted employment. It would be unap- 
preciative and tame not to use it appropriately. Uneasiness sat 
even on Henry, while we all tacitly and inactively awaited a 
worthy inspiration. 

Our meditation was interrupted by the appearance of Ivy Hixon, 
/the daughter of one of the renters, coming on one of her borrowing 
errands. She now carried a black-cracked teacup in her hand. 

" Mom wanted to know would your ma borrow her some saler- 
atus," she delivered herself. 

Questioning revealed that she wanted some baking soda. I arose 
with as good an imitation of my mother's air as I could manage, 
and led the way into the house. Mary followed us, and finally John. 

247 



248 THE WORKER AND HIS WORK 

Henry, who found no delight in the freckled Ivy, and had in fact 
compared her appearance to that of a grass-burr, sent an indifferent 
glance after us and then took himself off to the stables. For Henry 
the company of horses never staled. 

In the big storeroom of the kitchen — a mere pantry could not 
hold stores for a household of our numbers — we found the soda, and 
with as many manners as I could take on I gave Ivy a liberal helping. 

Ivy lingered to look around. " You've got lots of things to eat," 
she said. 

That had never seemed to me a cause for pride, but I tried to 
look affluent. However, I thought it better to edge Ivy back into the 
kitchen. My mother never talked to the renter women about the 
things we had. But even in the kitchen Ivy found much to comment 
on and linger over. I was uneasy at first; my mother was full of 
kindly attentions to the renter families, but the children never came 
to the house much. However, that prohibition appeared to belong 
to Maldy's administration, and to allow Ivy to remain for a while 
seemed to be a privilege of the day. Soon we were all talking freely 
and enjoying Ivy's admiration of the number and size of our kitchen 
utensils. She applauded the kitchen stove especially. Maldy's stove 
was no doubt a thing to admire, although at that time, not having 
the housekeeping point of view, we did not realize its praiseworthiness. 

A fire had been left, in Maldy's hasty after-dinner departure. 
Even its heat, as we assisted Ivy to admire it, seemed of a peculiarly 
efficient sort. Assuming technical knowledge, we displayed dampers 
and drafts and oven depths. Ivy looked appreciatively into the still 
warm oven. 

" Mom made a cake onst," she said, '^ when Uncle Jake's 
folks come." 

It was not for us to speak of cakes. 

" Can you cook? " she asked me. 

" Some," I answered conservatively. I had once mixed up corn- 
bread under Maldy's impatient direction. 

" I can fry side-meat and potatoes and make saleratus biscuits." 

We had learned that renters lived chiefly on hot biscuit; when 
I add that they called bread " light -bread " always, I have sufficiently 
indicated their social standing in our eyes. 

" We could make a cake right now," said Ivy. She spoke as one 



IVY OF THE NEGATIVES 249 

suggesting an enterprise, but a merely natural one to undertake. 
I was silent, as of course Mary was also. 

Said John in a moment, " Let's make a cake.'^ John had no 
culinary self-respect to preserve. Anyway, he was thinking less of 
the adventure than of the desirable result. 

" You put eggs in it, and milk and lots of sugar and flour and 
butter if you got it and lard if you ain't," said Ivy glibly. " I bet 
you folks got all them things." 

" Oh, yes," I answered hastily. " We've got everything." 

That seemed to be acquiescence, and we stood somehow com- 
mitted to the undertaking. Anyhow, adventure, the more lawless 
the better, had been calling to us. 

However, Ivy Hixon was not going to dictate to us in our own 
kitchen. Having made the suggestion, her officiousness expanded 
and threatened to take control of us all. I prepared to assert myself. 

"You beat the eggs first," said Ivy; "Mom took three." 

While I considered, Mary, the methodical, climbed to a shelf and 
brought down a cook-book. The possession of a cook-book was merely 
a concession to convention on Maldy's part, for she was never seen to 
use it and had been heard to speak contemptuously of it. Mary's lit- 
tle forefinger traveled down the index column to cakes. 

" There's a good many," she said. " What kind do we want? 
Here's Brown Stone Front and Nancy Hanks and Five Egg and 
Good White Cake and Jelly Cake and Chocolate Layer and Marble 
and Fairy Lily " 

" Let's have that," I said. 

Mary turned to it. " Whites of seven eggs, cup and a half of 
sugar," she began. 

" What do you do with the yolks? " I interrupted. I had sup- 
posed that an egg was a unit in cooking. 

Mary laboriously followed through the list of items and figures. 
" It don't say," she said. 

" Mom put 'em in," said Ivy. " Mom's cake was yallow. It 
wasn't no lily cake," she finished contemptuously. With the advent 
of the cook-book authority seemed likely to slip from her. " Mom 
put three whole eggs in her'n." 

" Let's make a big cake," said John. 

" Read the five-egg one," I dictated. 

" Five eggs beaten separately " began Mary. 



250 THE WORKER AND HIS WORK 

" That's awful funny," said Ivy. We all looked dubious, 
in fact. 

Mary finished out the proportions of the cake, conventional 
enough I suppose. The final statement that the recipe would make 
a very large cake was decisive for every one. 

" All right," I said briskly. I really was not, for my part, eager 
for the result, but the situation began to please me. " John, you 
fix up the fire, and don't take Maldy's cobs. Mary, we've got to wash 
our hands first." That was sheer virtue; a look at Ivy's had sug- 
gested it. Ivy joined us in common ablution, and, I think, saw the 
complexion of her hands for the first time in many a day. 

" We must clean our finger-nails," added Mary gently, to my 
surprise. Ivy plainly thought that unnecessary, but followed suit, 
matching the novel enterprise from her own experience, however, 
with, " Mom digs out the baby's nails sometimes." 

But, that concession to elegance over. Ivy quickly resumed her 
place again. I turned from the towel to find her setting out a flat 
crock for a mixing bowl, a row of five teacups, and a fork. 

" What are those for? "I asked. 

" To beat the eggs in. The book says so. 

I had never seen a process like that, and was doubtful; but still 
many an operation went on in the kitchen on which I did not 
trouble to cast my eye. I was not in a position to contradict, but I 
tried at least to awe Ivy by reaching down an egg-beater instead of 
the fork. Ivy looked at it a moment, tested its movement and, 
unimpressed, accepted it as a matter of course. She hung over the 
cook-book, business in her mien, energy radiating from her elbows. 
Nature had dealt but meagerly with Ivy. Her hair was sandy — sandy 
to the touch, I fancied — her face was sandy, her hands looked sandy. 
Her dress, to my embarrassment, was an old one of my own ; I tried 
to act unconscious of the fact. It hung loosely from her round 
shoulders and — although she was nearty as old as I — was far too 
long for her; but as she was barefooted, that was a good thing. Her 
scratched feet looked sandy, too. Her hair was tied with a white 
string, which was braided in for two or three inches from the end. 
I had suggested that means of security to Ellen when she braided 
my hair, but she did not accept the suggestion, although it would 
doubtless have saved me many a reproof. Whether because of this 
device or not. Ivy's scrawny little braid turned sharply outward from 



IVY OF THE NEGATIVES 251 

her meager shoulders and, with her quick, jerky movements, bobbed 
about like a question mark incessantly questioning. Before we got 
through with our enterprise that curled-up arc of hair seemed to 
me to be making the cake, it was so active, so ubiquitous. 

Ivy turned briskly from the cook-book and disappeared into the 
store-room. She was back almost instantly. 

" Say, there ain't but six eggs, and if we'd take them they'd 
know for sure. You go out and get some more. I bet the's a plenty." 

Dignity compelled me to pass the order on to John. Assuming 
initiative, I proceeded to get out the other ingredients, but always 
with Ivy at my elbow, making additional suggestions. " When you're 
getting get a plenty. That's vv^hat Aunt Em says. But Mom says 
when you ain't got any money — Say, ain't you folks got lots of 
sugar! Say, you could have cake every day." 

Her eyes saw every article in the store-room, and her tongue 
commented without trammel. Between times she issued orders with 
freedom and decision. I was always just going to, but Ivy steadily 
forestalled me. It seemed as if, whenever I turned to do a thing. 
Ivy's arc of braid was always bobbing just ahead of me. Information 
which I imparted to her became her own as completely as if it had 
never been mine. Within a few minutes she knew all the household 
equipment as well as Mary and I put together. It need not be 
supposed that I acquiesced readily in this system of precedence, 
but when there is no crevice in the front of authority where one can 
interpose opposition, and when one is hampered by hospitality be- 
sides, where is one going to begin to assert her independence? 

The mixing spoon was hardly ever out of Ivy's hands. She 
stirred and beat and sifted and stirred, in a housewifely ecstasy of 
creation. The words " a plenty " rolled lusciously on her tongue 
when she caught sight of our household stores. Only steady self- 
control kept her from altering the proportion of ingredients when 
abundance of butter or sugar came into view. It seemed a pity 
not to use more when there was " a plenty." Her imagination reached 
forward, and she hinted at something else to be done when the cake 
was off our hands. But this time even John did not rise to 
the suggestion. 

I should not have supposed that one person could find sufficient 
orders for three. I found myself obeying in a sort of bewilderment. 
Mary was kept busy washing dishes, because, as Ivy said, the elders 



252 THE WORKER AND HIS WORK 

would not want to find the kitchen " all gaumed up when they come 
back." It did seem wise to remove our traces. The eggs were 
beaten separately — that is, individually — and the process took some 
time. John thought it unnecessary, but Ivy overruled him with the 
words of the book. For one of comparatively limited acquaintance 
with literature, Ivy had remarkable reverence for the printed word. 
She seemed to take pride in having cooking thus connected with her 
stinted accomplishment of reading. 

At last everything was in, stirred and beaten, and beaten and 
stirred. Everybody, even John, had been allowed to take a hand 
at this; but it was Ivy's freckled little arms which gave the last 
loving strokes. At this moment Henry strolled in. 

We had got so used to Ivy that we had forgotten to miss Henry. 
But John, going out to find another egg to replace one which some- 
body dropped on the floor — ^we regretted it, but Ivy said there was 
plenty more — had mentioned to Henry that an enterprise was afoot 
within. After a little time for consideration, Henry decided to enter. 
He came loafing in, his hands in his pockets and a general air of 
mature leisure about him. I had just got out a cake-pan and Ivy 
had taken it from me and was buttering it with flying whisks of her 
fingers. She was putting a good deal of butter on it. 

Henry eyed the process a moment with remotely critical air. 
I think it was the first time he had noticed the operation at all, but 
it was for him to suggest improvement, now that he was here. 

" You're putting too much butter on that," he said briefly, with- 
out introduction. 

Ivy paused and looked at him, every freckle darting out sur- 
prise. She rubbed her nose with the back of her hand and eyed him 
above her buttery fingers. 

" You never made no cake," she answered. 

" Cake shouldn't taste of butter," said Henry, speaking calmly 
but succinctly, as an expert authority. " It'll make it fall," 
he added. 

Ivy, determined not to be impressed, continued to eye him as she 
ran her fingers round and round the pan. Henry took one hand 
from its pocket, lifted the mixing-spoon and let the batter drip 
from it while he scrutinized the compound intelligently. 

" It's too thin," he delivered judgment. 

"It's just like the book says, I guess," returned Ivy forcibly. 



IVY OF THE NEGATIVES 253 

Ivy was really misnamed. We were all responsible for the cake, but 
Ivy seemed to be its natural defender. 

His attention called to the cook-book, Henry turned to peruse 
it. He wore the air of a passing authority who had no personal 
interest in pointing out error. He did not keep us waiting long, 
however, before he spoke again. 

" Lots of cake have raisins in them. Let's put raisins in this." 

Let us! Even we who knew Henry well had never seen him 
adopt an exploit with greater promptness. But then we were used to 
Henry; many a time had he gathered us to his banner as sheep to 
a cause. Ivy alone found him a novelty. 

" The book never said nothin' about puttin' in no raisins," she 
said. " This ain't that kind of cake." 

With the air of one who was bloodied but spiritually unbowed, 
she stirred the cake again and bade me look at the fire. A few 
minutes before she would have given the order to John. Whether 
she acknowledged it or not, masculinity seemed to be in a stage 
of readjustment. 

Mary, returning from obeying Henry's order, reported that there 
were no raisins in store. It was embarrassing to us to admit that 
there was anything we did not have. Henry considered. Was there 
a substitute? He detained the putting of the cake into the oven, 
with a glance and a wave of the hand, while he meditated. 

" Raisins are nothing but grapes," mused John, " but grapes 
aren't ripe yet." 

Henry turned his eye on the window. The rest of us indicated 
the stages of our mental processes by discussion. Henry merely 
announced his results. 

" We'll get some cherries," he said. 

Ivy, who had been impatiently heehng and toeing beside the 
kitchen table, burst forth. " I never heard of no cherries in no cake. 
I bet they'd spoil it." 

" They'll make it thicker," said Henry, conceding a reply to her 
evident depth of feeHng. 

Ivy continued to stand by the table, smoothing and patting the 
surface of her cherished cake, while Henry marshaled the rest of 
us out to the Early Richmond cherry-trees. As a precaution he 
added her to the party, although she declared that the cake would 
fall while we were gone. 



254 THE WORKER AND HIS WORK 

It took only a few minutes, though, for the five of us to gather 
and seed a quart or more of cherries. Henry dumped the lot, reek- 
ing juice, into the batter and stirred them in. 

" It's thinner'n ever," wailed Ivy, " and it looks like all git out." 

Henry scrutinized it carefully. " It isn't any thinner, but it's 
too thin yet. We'll get some more cherries." 

This time we got two quarts. Henry stirred them in. 

Another wail broke from Ivy. " It's thinner'n ever," she almost 
sobbed. " You've done and spoiled it." 

" You didn't put flour enough into this," said Henry. '' That's 
what's the matter." 

" We put all the book said," I answered. Between grief and 
wrath Ivy was almost beyond speech. 

" Well, it takes more of some kinds than others. I guess this 
is a thin kind." 

We put in three more cups of flour, while Ivy stood in the back- 
ground, a mute angry spirit of protest. When the flour was all in 
we each inserted — not the first time — a finger at the edge of the 
batter and tasted our compound. It tasted queer and floury. Ivy 
frankly made a face. 

" You didn't put enough sugar in this," said Henry. " Cakes take 
a lot of sugar." 

" We put in all the book said," we answered once more. 

" It ain't sweet enough," said Henry, tasting again. " We'll put 
in more sugar." 

We put in two more cups of sugar. The batter was now almost 
running over the crock, and needed very careful stirring. The 
cake-pan which had been ready before, was now out of the question. 
Henry found a small dishpan, and bade me grease it. Mary washed 
the other and put it away. John made up the fire once more, and 
the cake went into the oven. We thought it polite to offer Ivy the 
crock to scrape, but she briefly declined it. Half an hour before each of 
us had an eye on that crock, but now no one cared for it. Mary 
washed it and put it away. She also washed up the table and every- 
thing else, and as far as we could see there was nothing to tell the 
tale on us except the cake in the oven. 

At the end of ten minutes, as the cake did not seem to be near 
baked, we settled down in various ways. No further enterprise seemed 
desirable. We really wished that Ivy would go home, but, as she 



IVY OF THE NEGATIVES 255 

did not seem inclined to do so, I read her AH Baba. She interrupted 
occasionally to say, " I bet that ain't ever happened." Her attitude 
surprised me; I did not mind its apparent discourtesy, but I did 
not see why any one should demand fact in a narrative. 

Any occupation we had on hand was interrupted frequently while 
we looked into the oven. Mary took a doll and went about some 
serious maternal business. The rest of us collectively looked into the 
oven every three minutes. If that cake had ever intended to do itself 
credit, it lost its chance through the embarrassment of our steady 
watching. As it was, the baking process was curious. We watched 
eagerly for the moment of rising, but it never came. It did once 
break its temporary shell to spout up on the middle with a small 
geyser-like formation, distinguished from the hopeless depression of 
the rest of the surface. The substance of the whole was of such a 
consistency that it would have taken a chemical analysis to tell 
whether it was baked or not. Like other Benjamin Wests, we 
nearly decimated the newest broom for straws — each of us used sev- 
eral each time we opened the oven door — but every time we withdrew 
them, gummy and unpalatable. 

Time was wearing rapidly away. They might be home at any 
moment. Ivy declined any further tales and crouched steadfastly 
by the oven door. 

At last the cake began to recede from the sides of the pan, 
and Henry, returning from a brief visit to his pony, announced that 
it was all drying up and must be taken out immediately. Anticipa- 
tion swelled among us. We forgot to watch the drive. Eagerness 
secured a burnt hand for each of us. But at last the cake was 
transferred from the oven to the kitchen table. One last problem 
arose. How did one take a cake from the pan? The natural thing 
seemed to be to take it by the little knob in the center and Hft it out. 
That proved unsuccessful. Henry and Ivy each had a theory; it 
is needless to say that Henry's was to be tried first, even over 
Ivy's final protest. 

" Now you all stand back," Henry was saying, as he selected 
a knife, " and I'll " 

Voices and wheels were heard outside. We looked at each other 
in consternation — consternation quite out of proportion to the 
offence. Panic fell upon us. Henry snatched up the cake, pan and 
all^ and with his usual quickness of resource made for the regions of 



256 THE WORKER AND HIS WORK 

the kitchen garden, which lay near. It was on the other side of 
the house from the drive, and was screened from it by some lilac 
bushes. At the very nearest place to the house a bit of soft, fine- 
delved ground lay waiting a later sowing of something, turnips 
probably. Henry seized a hoe which was conveniently at hand, made 
a hole in the soft earth, and in an instant that cake, with all its 
promise unfulfilled and its suspense still unanswered, was in its 
tomb. The dishpan was thrown to a convenient place under the lilac 
bushes and, the whole affair cleared up, we turned back to welcome 
the homecomers with as interested an air as if we had spent the 
afternoon merely waiting for their return. 

Ivy had stood looking on at the interment as if she were the 
embodiment of all possible mourners. Tragedy sat on her brow, 
and grief trembled on her lips. The moment anticipated all the 
afternoon was snatched from her as the child of her hands went under 
the soil. Even her braid had uncurled itself and hung straight and 
pendulous as any braid. As we turned away, I had a glimpse of 
pursed-up lips and hard-winking eyes, and I suspected a tear fell 
on the unworthy grave of that cherry-cake, the first and last of 
its kind. 

For us it was all over. We should have liked to see how that cake 
tasted; but Maldy always got an unusually good supper when she 
came back from town, as if to show her scorn of all she had seen in 
her absence. Anyway, we had had doubts about the cake from the 
first. I had never believed that we could make a cake, even when 
we were doing it. 

As we went into the house again, everybody eagerly assisting in 
carrying in the packages — with surreptitious squeezes and fingerings 
to help surmises as to contents — I saw Ivy darting homeward through 
the orchard. Her braid hopped up and down on her shoulders, and 
her slim skirt wrapped and flapped about her thin legs. The impetu- 
osity of her movement suggested more than mere hurry, I thought, 
remembering certain impassioned moments of my own. 

The evening went off very well, considering everything. After 
my mother had been away for a whole afternoon, we always had a 
very good time in the evening, and were allowed to sit up a little later 
than usual. And yet I went to bed with a sense of something im- 
pending. Certain matters had already called for remark. Henry 



IVY OF THE NEGATIVES 257 

explained that we had the fire on in 'order to have it ready when 
they came home. Such thoughtfulness should have brought out 
approbation, but Maldy made no comment. As for the cup of soda — 
well, Ivy Hixon had come for it, but why she went away without it 
no one knew. Maldy was no questioner, I will say that for her. 
But she went about the kitchen that evening with a roving eye, which 
promised no good for us. Our sin, which had seemed mild in the 
beginning, hardly equal to the occasion in fact, began to assume the 
appalling proportions of a crime. I went to bed meditating confession. 

Mary lay still for a while in her usual little fashion, and then 
went off to sleep. Our room was at the back of the house, and I 
could hear Maldy moving about below, setting all ready for the 
morning. Who knew what she might be discovering? Had we put 
away the flour-sifter and closed the sugar-bin and restored the bak- 
ing-powder to its place? I followed her movements in my imagina- 
tion, picturing what she was looking at. Her steps seemed to grow 
more heavy and portentous. What was she seeing now? 

Even when everything grew quiet underneath, I still listened for 
signs to reassure or terrorize. I sat up in bed embracing my knees, 
while my strained attention was fixed below. But everything was 
so silent down there that my alertness finally relaxed and my eyes 
wandered to the moon-lighted spaces below my window. Even the 
corner of the kitchen garden, which I could see, had a sort of agree- 
ableness, with the moonlight and the moon-made shadows upon it. 
I mused a while, watching the glorified lawn, and finally, with elbows 
on knees and chin on hands, began to make up a story about what 
I was going to do when I was twenty. 

Suddenly I sprang from the bed and ran to the window. Out 
in that garden corner some one was moving. I couldn't see very 
plainly at first, but undoubtedly there was a moving figure there. 
How had Maldy ever discovered? But as I looked I saw that it 
was Ivy's. She was groping around for the hoe we had used in the 
afternoon. I was indignant. Of course, somebody would see her — 
and then! She did not find the hoe, and stood for a moment unde- 
cided. Then she dropped to her knees and began to dig away at the 
soft earth with her hands. I condemned her entirely. She had got 
us into this, and now she was going to get us caught. And digging 
up cake out of the ground, too! I felt contempt. 
17 



258 THE WORKER AND HIS WORK 

A step sounded heavily on the porch below. Maldy always 
walked with a curious unbending tread. She stalked straight out 
by the path and around by the lilac bushes. Now Ivy Hixon had 
done it! She, too, heard by this time, and sat back on her heels to 
listen. Thus she was when Maldy rounded the lilacs and came 
upon her. Then she jumped up with a cry. I was almost sorry 
for her then, for I knew Maldy's summary handling of the renter 
children. Still, Ivy had brought this on herself. 

Maldy questioned abruptly and gruffly, standing with her hands 
on her hips and her elbows squared. Ivy answered, her speech all 
running together, until it ended in a high little wail, with a tragic 
gesture toward the ground at her feet. Maldy questioned further, 
her attitude tentative. Ivy answered again, her voice each time 
running up to its pathetic little cry at the end, and her hands 
making their tragic movement. This was not the effective Ivy of 
the afternoon. I could imagine her ending with, " And I never got 
none of it! " To my relief, however, Maldy seemed to be relaxing. 
She spoke briefly but with reserve. 

Presently she turned toward the house, Ivy following her, evi- 
dently at her bidding. Ivy waited on this side of the lilac bushes, not 
far from my window, while Maldy went into the kitchen to get the 
cracked cup and the soda, I supposed. I really was relieved, though 
not on Ivy^s account alone. 

Maldy returned, her bearing still amicable. But what was this 
she was bringing? The cup of soda, to be sure, and with it the 
remnant of the fresh sponge cake she had beaten up for supper — 
and a piece of jruit cake. I nearly fell out of the window as it 
came to view. Fruit cake was Maldy's choicest and best-concealed 
treasure. I suspected that even my mother asked her permission 
to use it. It was the topmost crown of our rarest social occasions. 
Maldy seemed always to have some, but we never caught her making 
it. When I have said that we never even asked her for it, I have 
said all. 

She was giving it to Ivy. She said, " Don't you eat this to-night, 
but you put it away and have it some time." Then she relapsed into 
her renter-children tone, " Now you better go right along home. 
Don't be hanging around here." Ivy went, cutting across the lawn 
and down through the shadowy orchard spaces. Her disposing of the 
sponge cake as she went did not seem to interefere with her speed. 



IVY OF THE NEGATIVES 259 

The next morning Henry himself slipped the dishpan down to 
the yards and washed it in the watering- trough. Unfortunately 
Maldy was in the kitchen when he cautiously brought it in, and her 
eye required explanation of him. 

" Why, I took this out yesterday to pick cherries in," he began. 

" Huuf," said Maldy, and turned her back on him. She gave 
the dishpan a proper washing with soap and hot water and hung it 
up in its place without another word. 



HYMN TO THE DAIRY MAIDS ON BEACON STREET 
By Christopher Morley 

Sweetly solemn see them stand, 
Spinning churns on either hand, 
Neatly capped and aproned white, 
Airy fairy dairy sight, 
Jersey priestesses they seem 
Miracling milk to cream. 

Cream solidifies to cheese 

By Pasteural mysteries, 

And they give, within their shrine. 

Their communion in kine. 

Incantations pure they mutter 
O'er the golden minted butter 
And (no layman hand can pen it) 
See them gloat above their rennet. 

By the hillside window-pane 
Rugged teamsters draw the rein, 
Doff the battered hat and bow 
To these acolytes of cow. 

Genuflect, ye passerby! 
Muse upon their ritual high — 
Milk to cream, yea, cream to cheese 
White lacteal mysteries! 
Let adorers sing the word 
Of the smoothly flowing curd. 
Yea, we sing with bells and fife 
This is the whey, this is the life. 

From Songs for a Little House, by Christopher Morley. Copyright, 
1917, George H. Doran Co., Publishers. 



260 



w> 




PORTEFAIX. BY CONSTANTIN MEUNIER 



ELLEN HANGING CLOTHES 
By Lizette Woodworth Reese 

The maid is out in the soft April light, 
Our store of linen hanging up to dry; 
On clump of box, on the small grass there lie 
Bits of thin lace, and broidery blossom-white. 
And something makes tall Ellen — air or look — 
Or else but that most ancient, simple thing. 
Hanging the clothes upon a day in spring. 
Like to a Greek girl cut out an old book. 
The wet white flaps; a tune just come to mind, 
The sound brims the still rooms. Our flags are out. 
Blue by the box, blue by the kitchen stair; 
Betwixt the twain she trips across the wind, 
Her warm hair blown all cloudy-wise about, 
Slim as the flags, and every whit as fair. 



Reprinted from Contemporary Verse, by permission of the author. 



261 



THE NAVAJO BLANKET 

By Charles Fletcher Lummis 

One of the striking curiosities of one of our Strange Corners is 
the Navajo Blanket. There is no other blanket like it. It is re- 
markable that half-naked savages in a remote wilderness which is 
almost a desert, unwashed nomads who never live in a house, weave 
a handsomer, more durable and more valuable blanket than is turned 
out by the costly and intricate looms of Europe and America; but it is 
true. The covers which shelter us nights are very poor affairs, artisti- 
cally and commercially, compared to those superb fabrics woven by 
Navajo women in the rudest caricature of a loom. Blanket-weaving 
is the one domestic industry of this great tribe of twenty thousand 
souls, whose temporary brush shelters dot the northwestern moun- 
tains of New Mexico and the eastern ranges of Arizona; but they 
do it well. The work of the men is stock-raising — they have a mil- 
lion and a half of sheep, a hundred thousand cattle, and several 
hundred thousand beautiful ponies — and they also plant a very little 
corn. The women have no housework to do, because they have no 
houses — a very different social condition from that of their neigh- 
bors, the cleanly, industrious, farm-tending, home-loving Pueblos. 
They make hardly any pottery, buying what they need from the 
expert Pueblos, in exchange for their own matchless blankets, which 
the Pueblos no longer weave. 

The Navajo country is a very lonely and not altogether safe one, 
for these Indians are jealous of intruders; but it is full of interest, 
and there is much to be seen in safe proximity to the railroad — 
particularly near Manuelito, the last station in New Mexico. 

It fairly takes one^s breath away to ride up one of these barren 
mesas, among the twisted pinons, and find a ragged Indian woman 
squatted before a loom made of three sticks, a rope, and a stone, 
weaving a blanket of great beauty in design and color, and with the 
durability of iron. But that is what one may see a thousand times in 
this strange territory by taking the necessary trouble, though it is a 

Taken from Lummis' Some Strange Corners of Our Country, by 
permission of The Century Co. 
262 



THE NAVAJO BLANKET 263 

sight that few white people do see. The Navajo is a seeker of se- 
clusion, and instinctively pitches his camp in an out-of-the-way loca- 
tion. You may pass within fifty yards of his hogan and never suspect 
the proximity of human life, unless your attention is called by one of 
his wolfish dogs, which are very fond of strangers — and strangers 
raw. If you can induce the dog to save you for supper, and will 
follow his snarling retreat, this is what you may see: 

Under the shelter of a juniper, a semicircular wind-break built 
breast-high of brush, and about fifteen feet from point to point; a 
tiny heap of smoldering coals; a few greasy sheepskins and blankets 
lying against the brush ; perhaps the jerked meat of a sheep hanging 
to a branch, and near it pendent a few silver ornaments; a bottle- 
necked basket, pitched without and full of cold water; an old Spencer 
carbine or a Winchester leaning against the "wall"; a few bare- 
legged youngsters of immeasurable mirth, but diffident toward 
strangers; mayhap the lord of the castle and a male companion or 
two playing cunquian with solemn faces and Mexican cards; the 
dogs, the lariated ponies — and the lady of the house at her re- 
markable loom. 

For simplicity of design, the Navajo " loom " — if it can be dig- 
nified by such a title — is unique. Occasionally the frame is made 
by setting two posts firmly in the ground about six feet apart, and 
lashing cross-pieces at top and bottom. So complicated an affair as 
this, however, is not usual. Ordinarily a straight pole is lashed 
between two trees, at a height of five or six feet from the ground. 
A strong rawhide rope, wound loosely round and round this, serves 
to suspend the " supplementary yarn-beam," a straight bar of wood 
five or six feet long. To this in turn is attached a smaller bar, 
around which the upper ends of the stout strings which constitute 
the warp are tied. The lower ends of these strings are tied to a simi- 
lar bar, which is anchored by stones at a distance of about two inches 
from the ground, thus keeping the string taut. And there is your loom. 

On the ground a foot away squats the weaver, bare-shinned and 
bare-armed, v/ith her legs crossed tailor-fashion. The warp hangs 
vertically before her, and she never rises while weaving. A stick 
holds the alternate cords of the warp apart in opposite directions, 
and thus enables her to run the successive threads of the woof across 
without difficulty. As soon as a thread has been thus loosely intro- 
duced to its proper position, she proceeds to ram it down with the 



264 THE WORKER AND HIS WORK 

tightness of the charge in a Fourth-of-July cannon by means of a 
long, thin, hard- wood " batten-stick," frequently shaped something 
like an exaggerated bread-knife. It is little wonder that that woof 
will hold water, or stand the trampling of a lifetime. Every thread 
of it is ranmied home with a series of vicious jabs sufficient to make 
it " set down and stay sat." For each unit of the frequently intricate 
pattern she has a separate skein; and the unhesitating skill with 
which she brings them in at their proper intervals is astonishing. 

Now, by the time her woof has risen to a point twenty-five to 
thirty inches above the ground, it is evident that some new arrange- 
ment is essential to her convenience. Does she get up and stand to 
the job? Not at all. She simply loosens the spirally wound rope 
on the pole above so that its loops hang a foot or two lower, thus 
letting down the supplementary yarn-beam and the yarn-beam by the 
same amount. She then makes a fold in the loosened web, and tightly 
sews the upper ege of this fold to the cloth-beam below, thus mak- 
ing the web taut again. This is the Navajo patent for overcoming 
the lack of our " revolving cloth-bearers." This operation is repeated 
several times before a full-sized blanket is completed. The smallest 
size of saddle blanket can be woven without changing the loom at all. 

All Navajo blankets are single ply, the pattern being the same on 
both sides. I have seen but two which had on one side a different 
pattern from that on the other. 

The range of quality in Navajo blankets is great. The common 
blanket, for bedding and rough wear, is a rude thing indeed beside its 
feast-day brother. These cheap ones, almost always of full size — 
about six by five feet — are made of the native wool. The Navajos 
raise their own sheep, shear them, card, twist, and dye the wool. 
The prevailing color of the blanket is natural — a whitish gray — and 
through this ground run cross-stripes, generallyof blue, but sometimes 
of red, black, or yellow. These stripes are mostly in native dyes, 
the blue being now obtained from American indigo. They also dye 
in any color with dyes made by themselves from herbs and minerals. 
These wool blankets require a week or so for weaving, and sell at 
from two dollars and a half to eight dollars apiece. They are fre- 
quently half an inch thick, and are the warmest of blankets, their 
fuzzy softness making them much warmer than the higher-priced, 
tighter-woven, and consequently stiffer ones. 

In the second grade of blankets there is an almost endless variety. 
These are now made of Germantown yarn, which the Navajos buy in 



THE NAVAJO BLANKET 265 

big skeins at the various stores and trading-posts along the line of 
the Atlantic and Pacific Railway, which passes some twenty-five miles 
south of the whole line of their reservation. And remarkably fine 
blankets they make of it. Their ability as inventors of neat designs 
is truly remarkable. The cheap blankets are very much of a piece; 
but when you come up into patterns, it would be difficult to find in the 
whole territory two blankets exactly alike. The designs are ingenious, 
characteristic, and admirably worked out. Sometimes the weaver 
traces the pattern on the sand before beginning her blanket, but as 
a rule she composes it in her head as the work progresses. Circles 
or curved lines are never used in these blankets. The prevailing pat- 
terns are straight stripes, diagonals, regular zigzags, diamonds and 
crosses — the latter being to the Indians emblems of the morning or 
evening star. 

The colors used are limited in number. Scarlet is the favorite 
red, and indigo almost the only blue in use. These and the white 
of the bleached wool are the original colors, and the only ones which 
appear in the very best blankets. It is curious that these savages 
should have chosen our own " red, white, and blue " long before we 
did — they were weaving already before the first European ever saw 
America. The Spanish conquerors brought the first sheep to the New 
World, and soon gave these valuable animals to the Pueblo Indians. 
So wool came into New Mexico and displaced the Indian cotton, and 
the Navajos quickly adopted the new material. 

But of late there has been a sad deterioration in Navajo weaving — 
the Indians have learned one of the mean lessons of civilization, and 
now make their blankets less to wear than to sell. So an abominable 
combination of colors has crept in, until it is very difficult longer to 
get a blanket with only the real Indian hues. Black, green, and yel- 
low are sometimes found in superb blankets, and so combined as 
not to lessen their value; but as a rule these colors are to be avoided. 
But now some weavers use colors which to an Indian are actually 
accursed — like violet, purple, dark brown, etc., the colors of witch- 
craft — and such blankets are worthless to collectors. With any 
Indian, color is a matter of religion, and red is the most sacred of 
hues. The amount of it in a blanket largely determines the price. 
An amusing instance of the Navajo devotion to red was brought to my 
notice some years ago. A post trader had received a shipment of 
prepared coffee, half in red papers and half in blue. In a month 
every red package was gone and every blue package was left on the 



266 THE WORKER AND HIS WORK 

shelves; nor would the Indians accept the blue even then until long 
waiting convinced them that there was no present prospect of getting 
any more red. 

The largest of these Germantown-yarn blankets take several 
weeks to weave, and are worth from fifteen to fifty dollars. 

The very highest grade of Navajo blanket is now very rare. It is 
a dozen years since one of them has been made; the yarn blankets, 
which are far less expensive and sell just as well to the ignorant 
traveler, have entirely supplanted them. Only a few of the precious 
old ones remain — a few in the hands of wealthy Pueblo Indians and 
Mexicans — and they are almost priceless. I know every such blanket 
in the southwest, and, outside of one or two private collections, the 
specimens can be counted on one's fingers. The colors of these 
choicest blankets are red, white, and blue, or, rarely, just red and 
white. In a very few specimens there is also a little black. Red is 
very much the prevailing color, and takes up sometimes four-fifths of 
the blanket, the other colors merely drawing the pattern on a 
red ground. 

This red material is from a fine Turkish woolen cloth, called 
balleta. It used to be imported to Mexico, whence the Navajos pro- 
cured it at first. Later, it was sold at some of the trading-posts in 
this territory. The fixed price of it was six dollars a pound. The 
Navajos used to ravel this cloth and use the thread for their finest 
blankets; and it made such blankets as never have been produced 
elsewhere. Their durability is wonderful. They never fade, no mat- 
ter how frequently washed — an operation in which amole, the sapo- 
naceous root of the palmilla, should be substituted for soap. As for 
wear, I have seen balleta blankets which have been used for rugs on 
the floor of populous Mexican houses for fifty years, which still 
retain their brilliant color, and show serious wear only at their broken 
edges. And they will hold water as well as canvas will. 

These finest blankets are seldom used or shown except upon 
festal occasions, such as councils, dances, and races. They are then 
brought forth with all the silver and beaded buckskin, and in a large 
crowd of Indians make a truly startling display. Some wear them 
the middle girt around the waist by a belt of heavy silver disks, the 
lower end falling below the knees, the upper end thrown loosely 
over the shoulders. Others have them thrown across the saddle, and 
others tie them in an ostentatious roll behind. 



THE NAVAJO BLANKET 267 

The Navajos and Pueblos also weave remarkably fine and beau- 
tiful belts and garters, from two to eight inches wide and two to nine 
feet long; and durable and pretty dresses for their women. 

The loom for weaving one of the handsome belts worn by Pueblo 
women is quite as simple as that of the Navajos for weaving blankets. 
One end of the warp is fastened to a stake driven into the ground in 
front of the weaver, the other to a rod held in place by a strap around 
her waist; so to tighten the warp she has only to sit back a little. 
The device for separating the alternate threads of the warp so that 
the shuttle can be pushed through looks like a small rolling-pin ; and 
in the weaver's right hand is the oak batten-stick for ramming the 
threads of the woof tightly together. The weaver sits flat upon the 
ground; generally upon a blanket to keep her mania clean, for the 
dress of a Pueblo woman is neat, handsome, and expensive. These 
belts are always two-ply, that is, the pattern on one side is different 
from that on the other. 

It may also be news to you to learn that both Navajos and 
Pueblos are admirable silversmiths, and make all their own jewelry. 
Their silver rings, bracelets, earrings, buttons, belts, dress pins, and 
bridle ornaments are very well fashioned with a few rude tools. The 
Navajo smith works on a flat stone under a tree; but the Pueblo 
artificer has generally a bench and a little forge in a room of his house. 



NORA 
By Elizabeth West Parker 

When I came back from Nora's burial 

I found the three days' work to do; 

The kitchen sink piled high with sticky dishes, 

The beds unmade, the pantry bare; 

Soiled rugs to sweep, soiled floors to scrub ; 

Besides, the countless, little, nameless things 

The true housekeeper's feet run after all day long 

And never overtake, — 

The tiny trivial tasks that show only when they 

Are left undone ; 

Yet their accomplishment makes all the difference 

Between the comfort and the rub 

Of daily living. 

Yes, she, the one I loved the best of all. 

Who ever turned toward me the brighter side of things. 

Who shared with me her beauty and her song. 

Was gone; 

Gone on to higher life; and there was left for me 

Only the same old toil and fret, — 

The dirt that I must fight each hour, 

Knowing full well that it would conquer me, 

That surely they would lay me down in it at last, — 

To rub, and scrub, and scour, and clean, 

To bake, and brew, and mend 

For those who did not care for me at all. 

And she was gone, gone, gone! 

Yet I took up the broom and pail with strength 
I never felt before. 
Lord! How she hated drudgery! 
She would not ever talk of it. 
268 



NORA 269 

How she laughed at those who spent a good time 

In telling how much work they'd done that day! 

Yet she was tied to drudgery herself 

As most of us must always be, it seems. 

" It is to do," she said, and kept her thought 

Upon the book, the music, and the bit 

Of loveliness her flashing needle wrought so cleverly. 

She had so little strength ; but with it all she loved 

The bird, the flower, the sky, the child — so hard 

That all who neared her caught her joy in life. 

No pain could spoil her smile; 

When it was winter out-of-doors, she made you think of spring. 

When I came back from Nora's funeral 
I worked with all my might and prayed, 
" Oh, let me be like her! " 



THE WOMAN AND HER RAIMENT 
By Ida Minerva Tarbell 

One of the most domineering impulses in men and women is that 
bidding them to make themselves beautiful. But this instinct, which 
has led men and women from strings of shells to modern clothes, 
like every other human instinct, has its distortions. It is in the 
failure to see the relative importance of things, to keep the pro- 
portions, that human beings lose control of their endowment. Give 
an instinct an inch, and it invariably takes its ell! The instinct for 
clothes, from which we have learned so much in our climb from 
savagery, has more than once had the upper hand of us. So dan- 
gerous to the prosperity and the seriousness of peoples has its 
tyranny been, that laws have again and again been passed to check 
it; punishments have been devised to frighten off men from indulging 
it; whole classes have been put into dull and formless costumes 
to crucify it. 

Man gradually and in the main has conquered his passion for 
ornament. To-day, in the leading nations of the world, he clothes 
rather than arrays himself. Woman has not harnessed the instinct. 
She still allows it to drive her, and often to her own grave prejudice. 
Even in a democracy like our own, woman has not been able to 
master this problem of clothes. In fact, democracy has complicated 
the problem seriously. 

tinder the old regime costumes had been worked out for the vari- 
ous classes. They were adapted both to the purse and to the pursuit. 
They were fitting — that is, silk was not worn in huts or homespun in 
palaces; slippers were for carriages and sabots for streets. The gar- 
ments of a class were founded on good sound principles on the whole 
— ^but they marked the class. Democracy sought to destroy out- 
ward distinctions. The proscribed costumes went into the pot with 
proscribed positions. Under democracy we can cook in silk petti- 
coats and go to the White House in a cap and apron, if we will. And 
we often will, that being a way to advertise our equality! 

Class costumes destroyed, the principles back of them, that is, 
fitness, quality, responsibility, were forgotten. The old instinct for 
270 



THE WOMAN AND HER RAIMENT 271 

ornament broke loose. Its tyranny was strengthened by the eternal 
desire of the individual to prove himself superior to his fellows. 
Wealth is the generally accepted standard of measurement of value 
in this country to-day, and there is no way in which the average 
man can show wealth so clearly as in, encouraging his women folk 
to array themselves. Thus we have the anomaly in a democracy 
of a primitive instinct let loose, and the adoption of discarded aristo- 
cratic devices for proving you are better than your neighbor, at least 
in the one revered particular of having more money to spend! 

The complication of the woman's life by this domination of clothes 
is extremely serious. In many cases it becomes not one of the sides 
of her business, but the business of her life. Such undue proportion 
has the matter taken in the American Woman's life imder democracy 
that one is sometimes inclined to wonder if it is not the real " woman 
question." Certainly in numbers of cases it is the rock upon which 
a family's happiness splits. The point is not at all that women 
should not occupy themselves seriously with dress, that they should 
not look on it as an art, as legitimate as any other. The difficulty 
comes in not mastering the art, in the entirely disproportionate amount 
of attention which is given to the subject, in the disregard of 
sound principles. 

The economic side of the matter presses hard on the whole country. 
It is not too much to say that the chief economic concern of a great 
body of women is how to get money to dress, not as they should, but 
as they want to. It is to get money for clothes that drives many, 
though of course not the majority, of girls, into shops, factories, 
and offices. It is because they are using all they earn on themselves 
that they are able to make the brave showing that they do. Many 
a girl is misjudged by the well-meaning observer or investigator be- 
cause of this fact — " She could never dress like that on $6, $8, or 
$15 a week and support herself," they tell you. She does not sup- 
port herself. She works for clothes, and clothes alone. Moreover, 
the girl who has the pluck to do hard regular work that she may 
dress better has interest enough to work at night to make her earnings 
go farther. No one who has been thrown much with office girls 
but knows case after case of girls who with the aid of some older 
member of the family cut and make their gowns, plan and trim their 
hats. Moreover, this relieving the family budget of dressing the girl 
is a boon to fathers and mothers. 



272 THE WORKER AND HIS WORK 

It is hard on industry, however, for the wage-earner who can 
afford to take $6 or $8 helps pull down the wages of other thousands 
who support not only themselves, but others. Moreover, to put in 
one's days in hard labor to dress well, for that is the amount of it, 
is demoralizing. 

Investigators of small household budgets lay it down as a rule 
that as the income increases the percentage spent for clothing in- 
creases more rapidly than for any other item. It is true in the pro- 
fessional classes, and especially burdensome there; for the income is 
usually small, but the social demand great. 

There are certain industrial and ethical results from this pre- 
occupation with clothes which should not be overlooked, particularly 
the indifference which it has engendered. The very heart of the 
question of clothes of the American woman is imitation. That is, we 
are not engaged in an effort to work out individuality. We are not 
engaged in an effort to find costumes which by their expression of 
the taste and the spirit of this people can be fixed upon as appropri- 
ate American costumes, something of our own. From top to bottom 
we are copying. The woman of wealth goes to Paris and Vienna for 
the real masterpieces in a season's wardrobe. The great dressmakers 
and milliners go to the same cities for their models. Those who 
cannot go abroad to seek inspiration and ideas copy those who have 
gone or the fashion plates they import. The French or Viennese 
mode, started on upper Fifth Avenue, spreads to Twenty-third 
Street, from Twenty-third Street to Fourteenth Street, from Four- 
teenth Street to Grand and Canal. Each move sees it reproduced in 
materials a little less elegant and durable, its colors a trifle vulgar- 
ized, its ornaments cheapened, its laces poorer. By the time it reaches 
Grand Street the four hundred dollar gown in brocaded velvet from 
the best looms in Europe has become a cotton velvet from Lawrence 
or Fall River, decorated with mercerized lace and glass ornaments 
from Rhode Island! A travesty — and yet a recognizable travesty. 
The East Side hovers over it as Fifth Avenue has done over the 
original. The very shop window, where it is displayed, is dressed and 
painted and lighted in imitation of the uptown shop. The same process 
goes on inland. This same gown will travel its downward path from 
New York westward, until the Grand Street creation arrives in some 
cheap and gay mining or factory town. From start to finish it is 



THE WOMAN AND HER RAIMENT 273 

imitation, and on this imitation vast industries are built — imitations 
of silk, of velvet, of lace, of jewels. 

These imitations, cheap as they are, are a far greater extrava- 
gance, for their buyers, than the original model was for its buyer, 
for the latter came from that class where money does not count — 
while the former is of a class where every penny counts. The pity 
of it is that the young girls, who put all that they earn into elab- 
orate Hngerie at seventy-nine cents a set (the original model prob- 
ably sold at $50 or $100), into open-work hose at twenty-five cents 
a pair (the original $10 a pair), into willow plumes at $1.19 (the 
original sold at $50), never have a durable or suitable garment. 
They are bravely ornamented, but never properly clothed. Moreover, 
they are brave but for a day. Their purchases have no goodness in 
them: they tear, grow rusty, fall to pieces with the first few wearings, 
and the poor little victims are shabby and bedraggled often before 
they have paid for their belongings, for many of these things are 
bought on the installment plan, particularly hats and gowns. 

This habit of buying poor imitations does not end in the girl's 
life with her clothes. When she marries, she carries it into her home. 
Decoration, not furnishing, is the keynote of all she touches. It is 
she who is the best patron of the elaborate and monstrous cheap furni- 
ture, rugs, draperies, crockery, bric-a-brac, which fill the shops of 
the cheaper quarters of the great cities, and usually all quarters 
of the newer inland towns. 

Has all this no relation to national prosperity — to the cost of 
living? The effect on the victim's personal budget is clear — the effect 
it has on the family budget, which it dominates, is clear. In both 
cases nothing of permanent value is acquired. The good linen under- 
garments, the " all wool " gown, the broadcloth cape or coat, those 
standard garments which the thrifty once acquired and cherished only 
awaken the mirth of the pretty little spendthrift on $8 a week. Solid 
pieces of furniture such as often dignify even the huts of European 
peasants and are passed down from mother to daughter for genera- 
tions — are objects of contempt by the younger generation here. Even 
the daughters of good old New England farmers are found to-day 
glad to exchange mahogany for quartered oak and English pewter for 
pressed glass and stamped crockery. True, another generation may 
come in and buy it all back at fabulous prices, but the waste of it! 

This production of shoddy cloth, cotton laces, cheap furniture, 
18 



274 THE WORKER AND HIS WORK 

what is it but waste! Waste of labor and material! Time and 
money and strength which might have been turned to producing 
things of permanent values, have been spent in things which have 
no goodness in them, things which because of their lack of integrity 
and soundness must be forever duplicated, instead of freeing industry 
to go ahead, producing other good and permanent things. 

What it all amounts to is that the instinct for ornament has gotten 
the upper hand of a great body of American women. We have failed 
so far to develop standards of taste, fitness, and quality, strong, sure, 
and good enough effectually to impose themselves. There is no 
national taste in dress; there is only admirable skill in adapting fash- 
ions made in other countries. There is no national sense of restraint 
and proportion. It is pretty generally agreed that getting all you 
can is entirely justifiable. There is no national sense of quality; 
even the rich to-day in this country wear imitation laces. The effect 
of all this is a bewildering restlessness in costume — a sheeplike will- 
ingness to follow to the extreme the grotesque and the fantastic. The 
very general adoption of the ugly and meaningless fashions of the 
last few years — ^peach-basket hats, hobble skirts, slippers for the 
street — is a case in point. From every side it is bad — defeating its own 
purpose — corrupting national taste and wasting national substance. 

Moreover, the false standard it sets up socially is intolerable. It 
sounds fantastic to say that whole bodies of women place their chief 
reliance for social advancement on dress, but it is true. They are 
or are not, as they are gowned ! The worst of this fantasy is not only 
that it forces too much attention from useful women, but that it 
gives such poise and assurance to the ignorant and useless! If you 
look like the women of a set, you are as " good '^ as they, is the demo- 
cratic standard of many a young woman. If for any reason she is 
not able! to produce this effect, she shrinks from contact, whatever 
her talent or charm ! And she is often not altogether wrong in think- 
ing she will not be welcome if her dress is not that of the circle to 
which she aspires. Many a woman indifferently gowned has been 
made to feel her difference from the elegant she found herself among. 
If she is sure of herself and has a sense of humor, this may be an 
amusing experience. To many, however, it is an embittering one! 

The true attack on the tyranny and corruption of clothes lies in 
the establishment of principles. 



THE WOMAN AND HER RAIMENT 275 

These principles are, briefly: 

The fitness of dress depends upon the occasion. 

The beauty of dress depends upon line and color. 

The ethics of dress depends upon quality and the relation of 
cost to one's means. 

In time we may get into the heads of all women, rich and poor, 
that an open-work stocking and low shoe for winter and street wear 
are as unfit as they all concede a trailing skirt to be. In time we 
may even hope to train the eye until it recognizes the difference be- 
tween a beautiful and a grotesque form, between a flowing and a 
jagged line. In time we may restore the sense of quality, which our 
grandmothers certainly had, and which almost every European 
peasant brings with her to this country. 

These principles are teachable things. Let her once grasp them 
and the vagaries of style will become as distasteful as poor drawing 
does to one whose eye has learned what is correct, as lying is to one 
who has cultivated the taste for the truth. 

As a method of education, instruction in the principles of dress is 
admirable for a girl. Through it she can be made to grasp the truth 
which women so generally suspect to-day; that is, the importance of 
the common and universal things of life; the fact that all these 
every-day processes are the expressions of the great underlying truths 
of life. A girl can be taught, too, through this matter of dress, as 
directly perhaps as through anything that concerns her, the im- 
portance of studying human follies! Follies grow out of powerful 
human instincts, ineradicable elements of human nature. They 
would not exist if there were not at the bottom of them some impulse 
of nature, right and beautiful and essential. The folly of woman's 
dress lies not in her instinct to make herself beautiful, it lies in her 
ignorance of the principles of beauty, of the intimate and essential 
connection between utility and beauty. It lies in the pitiful assump- 
tion that she can achieve her end by imitation, that she can be the 
thing she envies if she look like that thing. 

The matter of dress is the more important, because bound up 
with it is the whole grist of social and economic problems. It is 
part and parcel of the problem of the cost of living, of woman's wages, 
of wasteful industries, of the social evil itself. It is a woman's most 
direct weapon against industrial abuses, her all-powerful weapon as 
a consumer. At the time of the Lawrence strike. Miss Vida Scudder, 



276 THE WORKER AND HIS WORK 

of Wellesley College, is reported to have said in a talk to a group of 
women citizens in Lawrence: 

" I speak for thousands besides myself when I say that I would 
rather never again wear a thread of woolen than know that my gar- 
ments had been woven at the cost of such misery as I have seen and 
known, past the shadow of a doubt, to have existed in this town." 

Miss Scudder might have been more emphatic and still have been 
entirely within the limit of plain obligation; she might have said, " I 
will never again wear a thread of woolen woven at the cost of such 
misery as exists in this town." 

Women will not be doing their duty, as citizens in this country, 
until they recognize fully the obligations laid upon them by their 
control of consumption. 

The very heart of the question of the dress is, then, economic and 
social. It is one of those great every-day matters on which the moral 
and physical well-being of society rests; one of those matters which, 
rightly understood, fill the every-day life with big meanings, show 
it related to every great movement for the betterment of man. 

Like all of the great interests in the Business of Being a Woman, 
it is primarily an individual problem, and every woman who solves 
it for herself, that is, arrives at what may be called a sound mode of 
dress, makes a real contribution to society. There is a tendency 
to overlook the value of the individual solution of the problems of 
life, and yet the successful individual solution is perhaps the most 
genuine and fundamental contribution a man or woman can make. 
The end of living is a life — fair, sound, sweet, complete. The vast 
machinery of life to which we give so much attention, our govern- 
ments, and societies, our politics and wrangling, is nothing in itself. 
It is only a series of contrivances to insure the chance to grow a life. 
He who proves that he can conquer his conditions, can adjust him- 
self to the machinery in which he finds himself, he is the most genuine 
of social servants. He realizes the thing for which we talk and 
scheme, and so proves that our dreams are not vain! 



SHIPPING 
By Archie Austin Coaxes 

Here the gray wharf, crawling with jostling men, 

Redolent of the barter of the world ! 

Strange smells of unknown East and alien South, 

Hemp that reeks of damp Luzonian cellars, 

And hill on hill of bawdy-smelling hides ; 

Mattings swarming with strange sprawling marks 

Seeming a lyric poem of Japan, 

Instead of makers' stenciled business signs. 

Faint breaths of cinnamon and aloe smells 

Mixed with the knife-sharp fragrance of the sea; 

Great sacks of beans, like pearls, from Italy, 

And logs of teak by Burmese coolies cut. 

And by the wharf the great ship silent sleeps 
In beauty, as she were some huge sea cat 
Stretched in the morning sun to take her ease. 
A slow sea dowager of swelling flanks, 
Her long voyage done, who waits another day 
When, heavy-laden, she sets forth again 
To carry barter round the girdled globe. 

Here is the meeting-place of all the world — 
A nest of phantasies where sleeps Romance 
Under the sun of a long still summer morn. 



277 



UNEXPECTED DEVELOPMENTS 
By Peter Bernard Kyne 

Mr. Skinner thrust his head into Cappy Ricks' office and said: 

'^ I've just had a telephone message from the Merchants' Ex- 
change. The Tillicum is passing in." 

" Then," said Cappy Ricks, " in about two hours at the latest 
we may expect a mournful visit from Captain Matt Peasley." 

" If you don't mind, Mr. Ricks," said Skinner with a smirk, " I 
should dearly love to be present at the interview." 

Cappy smiled brightly. 

" By all means. Skinner, my dear boy; by all means, since you 
wish it. It just about breaks my heart to think of the cargo of grief 
I'm going to slip that boy; but I have resolved to be firm, Skinner. 
He owes us eighteen thousand dollars and he must go through with his 
contract to the very letter, and pay the Blue Star Navigation Com- 
pany every last cent due it. He will, doubtless, suggest some sort of 
settlement — ten cents on the dollar " 

" Don't agree to it," Mr. Skinner pleaded. " He has more than 
a thousand dollars a month going to his credit on our books from 
the Unicorn charter, and if that vessel stays afloat a year longer 
we'll be in the clear. Be very firm with him, Mr. Ricks. As you 
say, it is all for his own benefit and the experience will do him a 
whole lot of good." 

" I love the boy," said Cappy; " but in the present case. Skinner, 
I haven't any heart. A chunk of anthracite coal is softer than that 
particular organ this morning. Be sure to show Matt in the minute 
he comes up from the dock." 

Mr. Skinner needed no urging when, less than two hours later. 
Captain Matt Peasley arrived. Mr. Skinner greeted him courteosuly 
and followed him into Cappy's office. 

"Well, well, well! " Cappy began unctuously. "How do you 
do, Matt, my dear boy? Glad to see you; in fact, we're extra glad to 
see you," he added significantly and winked at Mr. Skinner, who 
caught the hint and murmured loud enough for Matt Peasley to hear: 

" Eighteen thousand dollars to-morrow! " 
278 



UNEXPECTED DEVELOPMENTS 279 

Cappy extended a hand, which Matt grasped heartily. 

" You're looking fit as a fiddle," Cappy continued. " Doesn't 
look a bit worried — does he, Skinner? " 

" I must admit he appears to carry it off very well, Mr. Ricks. 
We had thought, captain," Skinner continued, turning to Matt Peas- 
ley, " that, when Mr. Ricks agreed to permit you to assume command 
of the TUlicum when she reached Panama, we might have been 
treated to an exhibition of speed; but the fact of the matter is that 
instead of economizing on time you are about ten days in excess of 
the period it would have taken for Captain Grant to have discharged 
his cargo and gotten back to San Francisco." He winked at Cappy 
Ricks, who returned the wink. 

" You mean in ballast," Matt suggested. Skinner nodded. " Oh, 
well, that accounts for it,'^ Matt continued serenely. " I came home 
with a cargo of steel rails." 

Cappy Ricks slid out to the extreme edge of his swivel chair ; and, 
with a hand on each knee, he gazed at Matt Peasley over the rims of 
his spectacles. Mr. Skinner started violently. 

" You came home with a cargo of steel rails? " Cappy de- 
manded incredulously. 

" Certainly! Do you suppose I would go to the expense of hiring 
somebody else to skipper the TUlicum while I was there with my 
license? Not by a jugful! I was saving every dollar I could. 
I had to." 

" Er — er — Where is Captain Grant? " Skinner demanded. 

" Captain Grant is free, white and twenty-one. He goes where 
he pleases without consulting me, Mr. Skinner. He means nothing 
in my life — so why should I know where he is? " 

" You infernal scoundrel! " shrilled Cappy Ricks. " You whaled 
him and threw him out on the dock at Panama — that's what you did 
to him! You took the TUlicum away from him by force." 

" Captain Grant is a fine, elderly gentleman, sir," Matt inter- 
rupted. '' I would not use force on him. He left the ship of his own 
free will at San Diego, California." 

'' At San Diego? " Cappy and Skinner cried in unison. 

''' At San Diego." 

" But you said you were going to Panama on the City of Para, 
the regular passenger liner," Cappy challenged. 



280 THE WORKER AND HIS WORK 

" Well, I wasn't committed to that course, sir. After leaving 
your office I changed my mind. I figured the TUlkum was some- 
where off the coast of Lower California; so I wirelessed Captain 
Grant, explained to him that the ship was back on my hands by reason 
of the failure of Morrow & Company, and ordered him to put into San 
Diego for further orders. He proceeded there; I proceeded there; 
we met; I presented your letter relieving him of his command. Simple 
enough, isn't it? " 

" But what became of him? " 

" How should I know, sir? I've been as busy as a bird dog down 
in Panama. Please let me get on with my story. I had just cleared 
Point Loma and was about to surrender the bridge to my first mate 
when an interesting little message came trickling out of the ether — 
and my wireless boy picked it up, because it was addressed to ' Cap- 
tain Grant, Master S. S. TUlkum' " 

Cappy Ricks quivered and licked his lower lip, but said nothing. 

" That message," Matt continued, " was brought to me by the 
operator, who really didn't know what to do with it. Captain Grant 
had left the ship and Sparks didn't know at what hotel in San Diego 
the late master of the TUUcum would put up for the night ; so I read 
the message to see whether it was important, for I felt that it had 
to do with the ship's business and that I was justified in reading it." 

Again Cappy Ricks squirmed. Mr. Skinner commenced to gnaw 
his thumb nail. 

" That message broke me all up," Matt continued sadly. " It 
destroyed completely my faith in human nature and demonstrated 
beyond a doubt that there is no such thing in this world as fair play 
in business. It's like a water-front fight. You just get your man 
down and everything goes — ^kicking, biting, gouging, knee-work!" 
Matt sighed dolorously and drew from his vest pocket a scrap of 
paper. " Just listen to this for a message! " He continued. " Just 
imagine how nice you'd feel, Mr. Ricks, if you were skippering a boat 
and picked up a message like this at sea: 

" ' Grant, Master Steamer TUUcum: Gave Captain Matt Peasley 
a letter to you yesterday ordering you to turn over command of TUU- 
cum to him on presentation or demand. This on his request and on 
his insistence, as per clause in charter party, copy of which you have. 



UNEXPECTED DEVELOPMENTS 281 

Peasley leaves to-day for Panama on City of Para. This will be your 
authority for declining to surrender the ship to him when he comes 
aboard there. Stand pat! Letter with complete instructions for 
your guidance follows on City of Para. 

' Ricks/ " 

Cappy Ricks commenced tapping one foot nervously against the 
other, Mr. Skinner coughed perfunctorily, while Matt withered each 
with a rather sorrowful glance. 

" Of course you can imagine the shock this gave me. I give you 
my word that for as much as five seconds I didn't know what to do ; 
but after that I got real busy. I swung the ship and came ramping 
back to San Diego harbor, slipped ashore in the small boat and found 
Captain Grant at the railroad station buying a ticket for San Fran- 
cisco. I had to wait and watch the ticket office for an hour before 
he showed up, and when he did I made him a proposition. I told him 
that if he would agree to keep away from the office of the Blue Star 
Navigation Company you might think he was peeved at being relieved 
of his command so peremptorily, and hence would not attach any 
importance to his failure to report at the office. 

" In consideration of this I gave him my word of honor that he 
would be restored to his command as soon as I could bring the 
Tillicum back from Panama, and meantime his salary would continue 
just the same — in proof of which I gave him a check for two months' 
pay in advance. He said he thought it all a very queer proceeding; 
but, since he was no longer in command of the Tillicum, it wasn't up 
to him to ask questions, and he agreed to my proposition. However, 
he said he thought he ought to \vire the company acknowledging re- 
ceipt of their instructions with reference to surrendering his command 
— and I agreed with him that he should. ' But,' I said, 'why bother 
sending such a message, collect, ashore, when we pay a flat monthly 
rate to the wireless company for the plant and operator aboard the 
ship, no matter how many messages we send? Give me your mes- 
sage to Mr. Ricks and when I get back aboard the Tillicum I'll 
wireless it to him for you, and it won't cost the ship a cent extra.' 

" Well, you know your own captains, Mr. Ricks. They'll save 
their ships a dollar wherever they can; and simple, honest Old Man 
Grant agreed to my suggestion. Before he had an opportunity to 



2^2 THE WORKER AND HIS WORK 

consider I stepped to the telegraph office and wrote this message for 
him." Matt produced another telegram and read: 

" ' Blue Star Navigation Company, 
" ^ 258 California Street, San Francisco. 

" ' Instructions with reference to change of masters received. 

" ' Would feel badly if I thought any act of mine necessitated 
change; but since my conscience is clear I shall not worry. I always 
have done and always shall do my duty to my owners without thought 
of my personal interests, and you may rely fully on that in the 
present emergency.' 

" Well, sir, that sounded so infernally grandiloquent to Old Man 
Grant that his hand actually trembled with emotion as he signed it — 
at my suggestion. You know I'd hate to be tried for forgery. Then 
I shook hands with him and started for Panama once more — only this 
time I kept right on going; and I didn't spare the fuel oil either. 
Why should I? It wasn't costing me anything." 

Both Cappy and Mr. Skinner winced, as from a blow. Matt 
waited for them to say something, but they didn't; so after a re- 
spectful interval he resumed: 

" Off the Coronado Islands I sent you Captain Grant's diplomatic 
message. I was very glad to send it to you, Mr. Ricks, because I 
knew its receipt would make you very happy, and I like to scatter 
happiness wherever I can. The Scriptures say we should return 
good for evil." 

Cappy Ricks bounded to his feet and shook a skinny fist under 
Matt Peasley's nose. 

" Be careful how you talk to me, young man, or I'll lose my 
tempjer; and if I ever do " 

" That would be terrible, wouldn't it? " Matt laughed. " I sup- 
pose you'd just haul off and biff me one, and I'd think it was autumn 
with the leaves falling! " 

Cappy choked, turned purple, sat down again, and glanced 
covertly at Mr. Skinner, who returned the glance with one that 
seemed to shout aloud: " Mr. Ricks, I smell a rat as big as a Shet- 
land pony. Something has slipped and we're covered with blood. 
Incredible as it may seem, this rowdy Peasley has out- thought us! " 

" Did you get the letter we sent Captain Grant at Panama? " 
Skinner managed to articulate presently. 



UNEXPECTED DEVELOPMENTS 283 

Matt nodded affirmatively. 

" Opened it, I suppose! " Cappy accused him. 

Matt nodded negatively, produced the letter from his pocket 
and handed it to Cappy. 

" Where I was raised," he said gently, " they taught boys that 
it was wrong to read other people's private correspondence. You 
will note that the seal is unbroken." 

" Thank God for that! " Cappy Ricks murmured, sotto voce, 
and tore the letter into tiny bits. " Now, then," he said, " we'll hear 
the rest of your story." 

" When did a doctor look you over last? " Matt queried. " I'm 
afraid you'll die of heart disease before I finish." 

" I'm sound in wind and limb," Cappy declared. " I'm not so 
young as I used to be; but, by Jupiter, there isn't any young pup 
on the street who can tell me where to head in! What next? " 

" Of course, Mr. Ricks, very shortly after I had rechartered the 
Tillicum to Morrow & Company I began to suspect they were shy 
of sufficient capital to run their big business comfortably. I found 
it very hard to collect; so, fully a month before they went up the 
spout, I commenced to figure on what would happen to me if they 
did. Consequently, I wasn't caught napping. On the day Morrow 
committed suicide the company gave me a check that was repudiated 
at the bank. I protested it and immediately served formal notice on 
Morrow & Company that their failure to meet the terms of our 
charter party necessitated immediate cancellation; and accordingly 
I was cancelling it." 

"Did you send that notice by registered mail?" Skinner demanded. 

"You bet! — with a return registry receipt requested." 

Cappy nodded at Skinner approvingly, as though to say: " Smart 
of him, eh? " Matt continued: 

" After sending my wireless to Captain Grant aboard the Tilli- 
cum I sent a cablegram to the Panama Railroad people informing 
them that, owing to certain circumstances over which I had no con- 
trol, the steamer Tillicum, fully loaded and en route to Panama to 
discharge cargo, had been turned back on my hands by the charterers. 
I informed them that I had diverted the steamer to San Diego for 
orders, and in the interim, unless the Panama Railroad guaranteed 
me by cable immediately sixty per cent, of the through-freight rate 
for the Tillicum, and a return cargo to San Francisco, I would 



284 THE WORKER AND HIS WORK 

decline to send the TUlicum to Panama, but would, on the contrary, 
divert her to Tehuantepec and transship her cargo over the Ameri- 
can-Hawaiian road there." 

" Of course," Matt went on calmly, " I had no means of knowing 
what freight rate Morrow & Company received; but I figured that 
they ought to get about forty per cent., the Panama Railroad about 
twenty per cent., and the steamer on the Atlantic side the remaining 
forty. So I decided to play safe and ask sixty per cent, of the through 
rate, figuring that the Panama Railroad would give it to me rather 
than have the Tillicum's cargo diverted over their competitor's road 
at Tehuantepec. In the first place, they were depending on business 
from Morrow & Company's ships; and, with Morrow & Company 
gone broke and a new company liable to take over their line, it would 
be a bad precedent to establish, to permit one cargo to go to the 
competitor. Future cargoes might follow it! 

" Then, too, the schedule of the ships on the Atlantic side of the 
Canal doubtless had been made up already, with a view to handling 
this cargo ex-Tillkum and to lose the cargo would throw that sched- 
ule out of joint; in fact, from whatever angle I viewed the situation, 
I could see that the railroad company would prefer to give up its 
twenty per cent, rather than decline my terms. They might think 
their competitor had already made me an offer! Of course, it was 
all a mighty bluff on my part, but bluffs are not always called, par- 
ticularly when they're made good and strong; and, beUeve me, my 
bluff was anything but weak in the knees. I told the Panama people 
to wire their reply to me at San Diego, and when I got to that city, 
twenty-four hours later, their answer was awaiting me." 

" They called your bluff? " Mr. Skinner challenged. 

" Pooh-pooh for youl " Matt laughed. " God is good and the 
devil not half bad. I got the guaranties I asked for, old dear! Don't 
you ever think I'd have been crazy enough to go to Panama 
without them." 

Cappy Ricks jerked forward in his chair again. 

" Matt," he said sternly, " you have defaulted in your payments 
to the Blue Star Navigation Company to the tune of eighteen thou- 
sand dollars, and I'd Hke to hear what you have to say about that." 

" Well, I couldn't help it," Matt replied, " I was shy ten thou- 
sand dollars when Morrow & Company defaulted on me, and I was 
at sea when the other payment fell due. However, you had your 



UNEXPECTED DEVELOPMENTS 285 

recourse. You could have canceled the charter on me. That was 
a chance I had to take. 

" Why didn't you grab the ship away from me? If you had 
done that you would be in the clear to-day instead of up to your 
neck in grief." 

'' We'll grab her away from you to-day — never fear! " Cappy 
promised him. " I guess we'll get ours from the freight due on that 
cargo of steel rails you came home with." 

" You have another guess coming, Mr. Ricks. You'll not do 
any grabbing to-day, for the reason that somebody else has already 
grabbed her." 

" Who? " chorused Cappy and Skinner. 

" The United States Marshal. Half an hour ago the Pacific 
Shipping Company libeled her." 

" What for, you bonehead? You haven't any cause for libel, 
so how can you make it stick? " 

'' The Pacific Shipping Company has cause, and it can make the 
libel stick. The first mate of the Tillicum assigned to the Pacific 
Shipping Company his claim for wages as mate " 

" Matt, you poor goose! The Pacific Shipping Company owe him 
his wages. Your company chartered the boat, and we will not pay 
such a ridiculous claim." 

" I do not care whether you do or not. That libel will keep you 
from canceling my charter, although when you failed to cancel when 
I failed to make the payments as stipulated, your laxity must be 
regarded in the eyes of the law as evidence that you voluntarily 
waived that cla.use in the charter; and after you have voluntarily 
waived a thing twice you'll have a job making it stick the third time." 

" If I had only known! " groaned Skinner miserably. 

" Besides," Matt continued brightly, " I have a cargo in that 
vessel, and she's under charter to my company at six hundred dollars 
a day. Of course you know very well, Mr. Ricks, that while the 
United States Marshal remains in charge of her I cannot discharge 
an ounce of that cargo or move the ship, or— er— anything. Well, 
naturally that will be no fault of the Pacific Shipping Company, 
Mr. Ricks. It will be up to the Blue Star Navigation Company to 
file a bond and lift that libel in order that I may have some use of 
the ship I have chartered from you. If you do not pull the plaster 



286 THE WORKER AND HIS WORK 

off of her of course I'll have to sue you for heavy damages; and I 
can refuse to pay you any moneys due you." 

" We'll lift the libel in an hour," Mr. Skinner declared dramati- 
cally; and he took down the telephone to call up the attorney for 
the Blue Star. 

" Wait! " said Matt. '' I'm not through. Before I entered the 
harbor I called all hands up on the boat deck and explained matters 
to them. They had been engaged by Morrow & Company, and the 
firm of Morrow & Company was in the bankruptcy court; so the 
prospects of cash from that quarter did not seem encouraging. The 
Pacific Shipping Company had made a bare-boat charter from the 
Blue Star Navigation Compan}^, and had then made a similar charter 
to Morrow & Company ; consequently, the Pacific Shipping Company 
would repudiate payment, and, as president and principal stock- 
holder of that company, I took it on myself to repudiate any respon- 
sibility then and there. 

" Then the crew wanted to know what they should do, and I said: 
' Why, seek the protection of the law, in such cases made and pro- 
vided. A seaman is not presumed to have any knowledge of the 
intricate deals his owners may put through. All he knows is that he 
is employed aboard a ship, and if he doesn't get his money from the 
charterers at the completion of the voyage he can libel the ship and 
collect from the owners. This is a fine new steamer, men, and I, 
for one, believe she is good for what is owing you all; and if you 
will assign your claims to the Pacific Shipping Company I will pay 
them in full and trust to the Blue Star Navigation Company to reim- 
burse me.' So they did that. 

" Now go ahead, Mr. Skinner, and lift the libel I put on the 
vessel for my first mate's account, and the instant you get it lifted 
I'll slap another libel on her for account of the second mate. Get 
rid of the second mate's claim and up bobs the steward, and so on, 
ad libitum, e pluribus unum, now and forever, one and inseparable. 
I care not what course others may pursue, but as for me, give me 
liberty or give me death! " 

Mr. Skinner quietly hung up the telephone receiver. 

" And, by the way," Matt continued, '' I forgot to mention that 
I requested the steward to stay aboard and make the United States 
Marshal comfortable as soon as he arrived. In these little matters 



UNEXPECTED DEVELOPMENTS 287 

one might as well be courteous, and I should hate to have the Tillicum 
acquire a reputation for being cheap and inhospitable." 

Cappy Ricks muttered hoarsely. 

" Really, my dear Peasley, this matter has passed beyond the 
joke stage," Mr. Skinner began suavely. 

" Let me get along with my story," said he. " The worst is yet 
to come. My attorney informs me " 

" Matt Peasley," said Cappy Ricks, " that's the first lie I ever 
knew you to tell. You don't have to hire an attorney to tell you 
where to head in, you infernal sea lawyer! " 

" I thank you for the compliment," Matt observed quizzically. 
" Perhaps I deserve it. However, * we come to bury Caesar, not to 
praise him.' " 

" Well, I'll admit that the failure of Morrow & Company and 
the Pacific Shipping Company to pay the crew of the Tillicum puts 
the buck up to me, and I dare say I'll have to pay," Cappy admitted, 
his voice trembling with rage. 

" Well, that isn't the only bill you'll have to pay. Don't cheer 
until you're out of the woods, Mr. Ricks. You'll have to pay for a 
couple of thousand barrels of fuel oil, and a lot of engine supplies, 
and sea stores, and laundry, and water — why, Lord bless you, Mr. 
Ricks, I can't begin to think of all the things." 

"Not a bit of it! " Cappy cried triumphantly. "It was an 
open-boat charter, my son, and you rechartered on the same basis; 
and, though Morrow & Company were originally responsible, you'll 
find that the creditors, despairing of collecting from them, will come 
down on the Pacific Shipping Company like a pack of ravening 
wolves, by thunder! Don't you cheer until youWe out of the woods! " 

" Well, I have a license to cheer," Matt replied, " because I got out 
of the woods a long time ago. Before the vessel sailed from this 
port, I sent this letter to all her creditors! " And Matt thrust into 
Cappy Ricks' hand a copy of the letter in question. 

" That will not help you at all," Mr. Skinner, who had read the 
letter over Cappy 's shoulder, declared. 

" It wouldn't — if I hadn't sent it by registered mail and got a 
return receipt," Matt admitted; "but, since I have a receipt from 
every creditor acknowledging the denial of responsibility of the 
Pacific Shipping Company, I'm in the clear. It was up to the credi- 
tors to protect their hands before the vessel went to sea! They had 



288 THE WORKER AND HIS WORK 

ample warning — and I can prove it! I tell you, Mr. Ricks, when 
you begin to dig into this matter you will find these creditors will 
claim that every article furnished to the Tillicum while Morrow & 
Company had her was ordered on requisitions signed by Captain 
Grant, your employee, or Collins, your chief engineer. They were 
your servants and you paid their salaries.'^ 

" All right, then," Cappy challenged. " Suppose we do have to 
pay. How about that freight money you collected in Panama — eh? 
How about that? I guess we'll have an accounting of the freight 
money, young man." 

" I submit, with all due respect, that what I did with that freight 
money I collected in Panama is none of your business. I chartered 
a vessel from you and she was loaded with a cargo. The only interest 
you can possibly have in that cargo lies in the fact that the Pacific 
Stevedoring Company stowed it in the vessel and hasn't been paid 
some forty-five hundred dollars for so stowing it, and eventually, of 
course, you'll have to foot the bill as owner of the vessel. That 
vessel and cargo were thrown back on my hands, not on yours; so 
why should you ask questions about my business? " 

" But you'll have to render an accounting to Morrow & Com- 
pany," Cappy charged. 

"I'll not. They gave me a check that was returned branded 
' Not sufficient funds ' ; they didn't keep their charter with me, and 
if I hadn't been a fly young fellow their failure would have ruined 
me, and then a lot they'd care about it! If I spoke to them about 
it they'd say: * Well, these things will happen in business. We're 
sorry, but what can we do about it? ' No, Mr. Ricks; I'm in the 
clear with Morrow & Company, and their creditors will be lucky 
if I do not present my claim for ten thousand dollars because of that 
v/orthless check I hold. When I collected from the Panama Railroad 
Company for the freight on that southbound cargo I paid myself 
all Morrow & Company owed me, and the rest is velvet if I choose 
to keep it. If I do not choose to keep it the only honorable course 
for me to pursue will be to send a statement and my check for the 
balance to the receiver for Morrow & Company." 

"What! " demanded Mr. Skinner. "And leave the Blue Star 
Navigation Company to pay the crew? " 

" Yes — and the fuel bill, and the butcher and the baker and 
the candlestick maker, and the stevedoring firm." 



UNEXPECTED DEVELOPMENTS 289 

Cappy Ricks motioned to Mr. Skinner to be silent; then he rose 
and placed his hand on Matt's shoulder. 

" Matt," he said kindly, " look me in the eyes and see if you 
can have the crust to tell me that, with all that freight money in 
your possession, you do not intend to apply the residue to the pay- 
ments of these claims against the Tillicum." 

Matt bent low and peered fiercely into Cappy 's face, for all 
the world like a belligerent rooster. 

" Once more, my dear Mr. Ricks," he said impressively, " I 
desire to inform you that, so far as the steamer Tillicum is concerned, 
1 venerate you as a human Christmas tree. I'm the villain in this 
sketch and proud of it. You're stabbed to the hilt! Why should 
I be expected to pay the debts of your steamer? " 

" But you used all the materials placed aboard her for your own 
use and benefit." 

" That, Mr. Ricks, constitutes my profit," Matt retorted pleas- 
antly. " She had fuel oil aboard when she was turned back on me 
sufficient to last her to Panama and return — she had engine supplies, 
gear, beef in the refrigerator, provisions in the storeroom, and clean 
laundry in the linen lockers; in fact, I never went to sea in command 
of a ship that was better found." 

" Matt Peasley," said Cappy solemnly, " you think this is funny; 
but it isn't. You do not realize what you are doing. Why, this 
action of yours will be construed as highway robbery and no man on 
the Street will trust you. You must think of your future in business. 
If this leaks out nobody will ever extend you any credit " 

"I should worry about credit when I have the cash! " Matt 
retorted. '' I'm absolutely within the law, and this whole affair is 
my picnic and your funeral. Moreover, I dare you to give rne per- 
mission to circulate this story up and down California Street! Yes, 
sir, I dare you — and you aren't game! Why, everybody would be 
cheering for me and laughing at you. I haven't any sympathy for 
you, Mr. Ricks. You got me into this whole mess when a kind word 
from you would have kept me out of it. But, no; you wouldn't 
extend me that kind word. You wanted to see me get tangled up 
and go broke; and when you thought I was a dead one you made 
fun of me and rejoiced in my wretchedness, and did everything you 
could to put me down and out, just so you could say: ^ Well, I warned 
19 



290 THE WORKER AND HIS WORK 

you, Matt; but you would go to it. You have nobody to blame 
but yourself.' 

" Of course, I realize that you didn^t want to make any money 
out of me; but you did want to manhandle me, Mr. Ricks, just as 
a sporting proposition. Besides, you tried to double-cross me with 
that wireless message. I knew what you were up to. You thought 
you had pulled the same stunt on me I pulled on you, and that letter 
to Captain Grant contained full instructions. However, you wanted 
to be so slick about it you wouldn't get caught with your fingers in 
the jam; so you forbore to cancel my charter. You figured you'd 
present me with my troubles all in one heap the day I got back from 
Panama. I'm onto you!" 

" Well, I guess we've still got a sting in our tail," Cappy answered 
pertly. " Slap on your libels. We'll lift 'em all, and to-morrow we'll 
expect eighteen thousand dollars from you, or I'm afraid, Matthew, 
my boy, you're going to lose that ship with her cargo of steel rails, 
and we'll collect the freight." 

" Again you lose. You'll have to make a formal written demand 
on me for the money before you cancel the charter; and when you 
do I'll hand you a certified check for eighteen thousand dollars. 
Don't think for a minute that I'm a pauper, Mr. Ricks; because I'm 
not. When a fellow freights one cargo to Panama and another back, 
and it doesn't cost him a cent to stow the first cargo and cheap 
Jamaica labor to stow the second, and the cost of operating the ship 
for the round trip is absolutely nil — I tell you, sir, there's 
money in it." 

Cappy Ricks' eyes blazed, but he controlled his temper and 
made one final appeal. 

" Matt," he said plaintively, " don't tell me that a Peasley, of 
Thomaston, Maine, would take advantage of certain adventitious cir- 
cumstances and the legal loopholes provided by our outrageous 
maritime laws " 

" To swindle the Blue Star Navigation Company! " Mr. Skin- 
ner cut in. 

" Swindle is an ugly word, Mr. Skinner. Please do not use it 
again to describe my legitimate business — and don't ask any sym^ 
pathy of me. You two are old enough and experienced enough in the 
shipping game to spin your own tops. You didn't give me any the 
best of it; you crowded my hand and joggled my elbow, and it would 



UNEXPECTED DEVELOPMENTS 291 

have been the signal for a half holiday in the office if I had 
gone broke." 

" But after all Mr. Ricks has done for you " 

" He always had value received, and I asked no favors of him — 
and received none." 

" But surely, my dear Matt," Skinner purred, for the first time 
calling his ancient enemy by his Christian name — ^" surely you're 
jesting with us." 

" Skinner, old horse, I was never more serious in my life. Mr. 
Alden P. Ricks is my ideal of a perfect business man; and just before 
I left for Panama he informed me — rather coldly, I thought — that 
he never mixed sentiment with business. Moreover, he advised me 
not to do it either. To surrender to him now would mean the frac- 
turing, for the first time in history, of a slogan that has been in the 
Peasley tribe for generations." 

" What's that? " Cappy queried with shaking voice. 

" Pay your way and take your beating like a sport, sir," Matt 
shot at him. He drew out his watch. " Well," he continued, " I 
guess the United States Marshal is in charge of the Tillicum by this 
time; so get busy with the bond and have him removed from the 
ship. The minute one of those birds lights on my deck I just 
go crazy! " 

"Yes, you do! " screamed Cappy Ricks, completely losing his 
self-control. " You go crazy — ^like a fox! " 

And then Cappy Ricks did something he had never done before. 
He swore, with a depth of feeling and a range of language to be 
equaled only by a lumberjack. Matt Peasley waited until he sub- 
sided for lack of new invective and then said reproachfully: 

" I can't stand this any longer, Mr. Ricks. I'll have to go now. 
Back home I belonged to the Congregational Church " 

" Out! " yelled Cappy. " Out, you vagabond! " 



THE COD-FISHER 

By Joseph Crosby Lincoln 

Where leap the long Atlantic swells 

In foam-streaked stretch of hill and dale, 
Where shrill the north-wind demon yells, 

And flings the spindrift down the gale; 
Where, beaten against the bending mast, 

The frozen raindrop clings and cleaves. 
With steadfast front for calm or blast 

His battered schooner rocks and heaves^ 

To some the gain, to some the loss. 
To each the chance, the risk, the fight: 

For men must die that men must live — 
Lord, may we steer our course aright. 

The dripping deck beneath him reels. 

The flooded scuppers spout the brine; 
He heeds them not, he only feels 

The tugging of a tightened line. 
The grim white sea-fog o'er him throws 

Its clammy curtain, damp and cold ; 
He minds it not — his work he knows, 

'Tis but to fill an empty hold. 

Oft, driven through the night's blind wrack, 

He feels the dread berg's ghastly breath. 
Or hears draw nigh through walls of black 

A throbbing engine chanting death ; 
But with a calm unwrinkled brow 

He fronts them, grim and undismayed. 
For storm and ice and liner's bowr— 

These are but chances of the trade. 
292 



THE COD-FISHER 293 

Yet well he knows — ^where'er it be, 

On low Cape Cod or bluff Cape Ann — 
With straining eyes that search the sea 

A watching woman waits her man. 
He knows it and his love is deep, 

But work is work, and bread is bread, 
And though men drown and women weep 

The hungry thousands must be fed. 

To some the gain, to some the loss, 

To each his chance, the game with Fate: 

For men must die that men must live — 
Dear Lord, be kind to those who wait. 



ABNER'S WHALE 
By Frank Thomas Bullen 

In a previous chapter I have referred to the fact of a bounty 
being offered to whoever should first sight a useful whale, payable 
only in the event of the prize being secured by the ship. In conse- 
quence of our ill-success, and to stimulate the watchfulness of all, 
that bounty was now increased from ten pounds of tobacco to twenty, 
or fifteen dollars, whichever the winner chose to have. Most of us 
whites regarded this as quite out of the question for us, whose un- 
trained vision was as the naked eye to a telescope when pitted against 
the eagle-like sight of the Portuguese. Nevertheless, we all did our 
little best, and I know, for one, that when I descended from my lofty 
perch, after a two hours' vigil, my eyes often ached and burned for 
an hour afterwards from the intensity of my gaze across the shining 
waste of waters. 

Judge, then, of the surprise of everybody, when one forenoon 
watch, three days after we had lost sight of Trinidada, a most 
extraordinary sound was heard from the fore crow's-nest. I was, at 
the time, up at the main, in company with Louis, the mate's har- 
pooner, and we stared across to see whatever was the matter. The 
watchman was unfortunate Abner Gushing, whose trivial offence had 
been so severely punished a short time before, and he was gesticulating 
and howling like a madman. Up from below came the deep growl 
of the skipper, " Foremast head, there, what d'ye say? " "B-b-b-blow, 
s-s-sir," stammered Abner; " a big whale right in the way of the sun, 
sir." " See anythin', Louey? " roared the skipper to my companion, 
just as we had both " raised " the spout almost in the glare cast by 
the sun. " Yessir," answered Louis; " but I kaint make him eout 
yet, sir." " All right; keep yer eye on him, and lemme know sharp "; 
and away he went aft for his glasses. 

The course was slightly altered, so that we headed direct for the 
whale, and in less than a minute afterwards we saw distinctly the 
great black column of a sperm whale's head rise well above the sea, 
scattering a circuit of foam before it, and emitting a bushy, tufted 
burst of vapor into the clear air. " There she white- waters! Ah, 
294 



ABNER'S WHALE 295 

bj[-o-o>"0-o-o-w, blow, blow! " sang Louis; and then, in another tone, 
" Sperm whale, sir; big, 'lone fish, headin' 'beout east-by-no the." 
" All right. 'Way down from aloft," answered the skipper, who was 
already half-way up the main-rigging; and like squirrels we slipped 
out of our hoops and down the backstays, passing the skipper like a 
flash as he toiled upwards, bellowing orders as he went. Short as our 
journey down had been, when we arrived on deck we found all ready 
for a start. But as the whale was at least seven miles away, and we 
had a fair wind for him, there was no hurry to lower, so we all stood 
at attention by our respective boats, waiting for the signal. I found, 
to my surprise, that, although I was conscious of a much more rapid 
heart-beat than usual, I was not half so scared as I expected to be — 
that the excitement was rather pleasant than otherwise. There were 
a few traces of funk about some of the others still ; but as for Abner, 
he was fairly transf orm.ed ; I hardly loiew the man. He was one of 
Goliath's boat's crew, and the big darkey was quite proud of him. 
His eyes sparkled, and he chuckled and smiled constantly, as one who 
is conscious of having done a grand stroke of business, not only for 
himself, but for all hands. " Lower away boats! " came pealing down 
from the skipper's lofty perch, succeeded instantly by the rattle of 
the patent blocks as the falls flew through them, while the four beau- 
tiful craft took the water with an almost simultaneous splash. The 
ship-keepers had trimmed the yards to the wind and hauled up the 
courses, so that simply putting the helm down deadened our way, 
and allowed the boats to run clear without danger of fouling one 
another. To shove off and hoist sail was the work of a few moments, 
and with a fine working breeze away we went. As before, our boat, 
being the chief's, had the post of honor; but there was now only one 
whale, and I rather wondered why we had all left the ship. Accord- 
ing to expectations, down he went when we were within a couple of 
miles of him, but quietly and with great dignity, elevating his tail 
perpendicularly in the air, and sinking slowly from our view. Again 
I found Mr. Count talkative. 

" Thet whale'll stay down fifty minutes, I guess," said he, " fer 
he's every gill ov a hundred en twenty bar'l; and don't yew fergit it." 
" Do the big whales give much more trouble than the little ones? " I 
asked, seeing him thus chatty. " Wall, it's jest ez it happens, boy — 
just ez it happens. I've seen a fifty-bar'l bull make the purtiest fight 
I ever hearn tell ov — a fight thet lasted twenty hours, stove three 



296 THE WORKER AND HIS WORK 

boats, 'n killed two men. Then, again, I've seen a hundred 'n fifty 
bar'l whale lay 'n take his grooel 'thout hardly wunkin' 'n eyelid — 
never moved ten fathom from fust iron till fin eout. So yew may say, 
boy, that they're like peepul — got thair individooal pekyewlyarities, 
an' thar's no countin' on 'em for sartin nary time." I was in great 
hopes of getting some useful information while his mood lasted; but 
it was over, and silence reigned. Nor did I dare to ask any more 
questions; he looked so stern and fierce. The scene was very striking. 
Overhead, a bright blue sky just fringed with fleecy little clouds; 
beneath, a deep blue sea with innumerable tiny wavelets dancing and 
glittering in the blaze of the sun; but all swayed in one direction by 
a great, solemn swell that slowly rolled from east to west, like the 
measured breathing of some world-supporting monster. Four little 
craft in a group, with twenty-four men in them, silently waiting for 
battle with one of the mightiest of God's creatures — one that was 
indeed a terrible foe to encounter were he but wise enough to make the 
best use of his opportunities. Against him we came with our puny 
weapons, of which I could not help reminding myself that " he laugh- 
eth at the shaking of a spear." But when the man's brain was thrown 
into the scale against the instinct of the brute, the contest looked less 
unequal than at first sight, for there is the secret of success. My 
musings were very suddenly interrupted. Whether we had overrun 
our distance, or the whale, who was not " making a passage," but 
feeding, had changed his course, I do not know; but, anyhow, he 
broke water close ahead, coming straight for our boat. His great 
black head, like the broad bow of a dumb barge, driving the waves 
before it, loomed high and menacing to me, for I was not forbidden 
to look ahead now. But coolly, as if coming alongside the ship, the 
mate bent to the big steer-oar, and swung the boat off at right angles 
to her course, bringing her back again with another broad sheer as 
the whale passed foaming. This manceuver brought us side by side 
with him before he had time to realize that we were there. Up till 
that instant he had evidently not seen us, and his surprise was cor- 
respondingly great. To see Louis raise his harpoon high above his 
head, and with a hoarse grunt of satisfaction plunge it into the black, 
shining mass beside him up to the hitches, was indeed a sight to be 
remembered. Quick as thought he snatched up a second harpoon, and 
as the whale rolled from us it flew from his hand, burying itself like 
the former one, but lower down the body. The great impetus we had 



ABNER'S WHALE 297 

when we reached the whale carried us a long way past him, out of all 
danger from his struggles. No hindrance was experienced from the 
line by which we were connected with the whale, for it was loosely 
coiled in a space for the purpose in the boat's bow to the extent of 
two hundred feet, and this was cast overboard by the harpooner as 
soon as the fish was fast. He made a fearful to-do over it, rolling 
completely over several times backward and forward, at the same 
time smiting the sea with his mighty tail, making an almost deafening 
noise and pother. But we were comfortable enough, while we un- 
shipped the mast and made ready for action, being sufficiently far 
away from him to escape the full effects of his gambols. It was im- 
possible to avoid reflecting, however, upon what would happen if, in 
our unprepared and so far helpless state, he were, instead of simply 
tumbling about in an aimless, blind sort of fury, to rush at the boat 
and try to destroy it. Very few indeed would survive such an attack, 
unless the tactics were radically altered. No doubt they would be, for 
practices grow up in consequence of the circumstances with which 
they have to deal. 

After the usual time spent in furious attempts to free himself 
from our annoyance, he betook himself below, leaving us to await 
his return, and hasten it as much as possible by keeping a severe 
strain upon the line. Our efforts in this direction, however, did not 
seem to have any effect upon him at all. Flake after flake ran out of 
the tubs, until we were compelled to hand the end of our line to the 
second mate to splice his own on to. Still it slipped away, and at 
last it was handed to the third mate, whose two tubs met the same 
fate. It was now Mistah Jones' turn to '' bend on," which he did with 
many chuckles as of a man who was the last resource of the unfor- 
tunate. But his face grew longer and longer as the never-resting line 
continued to disappear. Soon he signaled us that he was nearly out 
of line, and two or three minutes after he bent on his " drogue " (a 
square piece of plank with a rope tail spliced into its center, and con- 
sidered to hinder a whale's progress at least as much as four boats) , 
and let go the end. We had each bent on our drogues in the same 
way, when we passed our ends to one another. So now our friend 
was getting along somewhere below with 7200 feet of l^^-inch rope, 
and weight additional equal to the drag of sixteen 30-feet boats. 

Of course, we knew that, unless he were dead and sinking, he 
could not possibly remain much longer beneath the surface. The 



298 THE WORKER AND HIS WORK 

exhibition of endurance we had just been favored with was a very 
unusual one, I was told, it being a rare thing for a cachalot to take 
out two boats' lines before returning to the surface to spout. 

Therefore, we separated as widely as was thought necessary, in 
order to be near him on his arrival. It was, as might be imagined, 
some time before we saw the light of his countenance; but when we 
did, we had no difficulty in getting alongside of him again. My friend 
Goliath, much to my delight, got there first, and succeeded in pick- 
ing up the bight of the line. But having done so, his chance of dis- 
tinguishing himself was gone. Hampered by the immense quantity 
of sunken line which was attached to the whale, he could do nothing, 
and soon received orders to cut the bight of the line and pass the 
whale's end to us. He had hardly obeyed, with a very bad grace, 
when the whale started off to windward with us at a tremendous rate. 
The other boats, having no line, could do nothing to help, so away 
we went alone, with barely a hundred fathoms of line, in case he 
should take it into his head to sound again. The speed at which he 
went made it appear as if a gale of wind was blowing, and we flew 
along the sea surface, leaping from crest to crest of the waves with 
an incessant succession of cracks like pistol-shots. The flying spray 
drenched us and prevented us from seeing him, but I fully realized 
that it was nothing to what we should have to put up with if the wind 
freshened much. One hand was kept baling the water out which came 
so freely over the bows, but all the rest hauled with all their might 
upon the line, hoping to get a little closer to the flying monster. Inch 
by inch we gained on him, encouraged by the hoarse objurgations of 
the mate, whose excitement was intense. After what seemed a terribly 
long chase, we found his speed slackening, and we redoubled our 
efforts. Now we were close upon him ; now, in obedience to the steers- 
man, the boat sheered out a bit, and we were abreast of his laboring 
flukes; now the mate hurls his quivering lance with such hearty 
good-will that every inch of its slender shaft disappeared within the 
huge body. " Lay off! Off with her, Louey! " screamed the mate; 
and she gave a wide sheer away from the whale, not a second too 
soon. Up flew that awful tail, descending with a crash upon the water 
not two feet from us. " Out oars! Pull, two! starn, three! " shouted 
the mate ; and as we obeyed our foe turned to fight. Then might one 
see how courage and skill were such mighty factors in the apparently 
unequal contest. The whale's great length made it no easy job for 



ABNER'S WHALE 299 

him to turn, while our boat, with two oars a-side, and the great lever- 
age at the stern supplied by the nineteen-foot steer-oar, circled, 
backed, and darted ahead like a living thing animated by the mind 
of our commander. When the leviathan settled, we gave a wide berth 
to his probable place of ascent; when he rushed at us, we dodged him; 
when he paused, if only momentarily, in we jflew, and got home a fear- 
ful thrust of the deadly lance. 

All fear was forgotten now — I panted, thirsted for his life. Once, 
indeed, in a sort of frenzy, when for an instant we lay side by side with 
him, I drew my sheath-knife, and plunged it repeatedly into the blub- 
ber, as if I were assisting in his destruction. Suddenly the mate 
gave a howl: " Starn all — starn all! oh, starni " and the oars bent 
like canes as we obeyed. There was an upheaval of the sea just 
ahead; then slowly, majestically, the vast body of our foe rose into 
the air. Up, up it went, while my heart stood still, until the whole 
of that immense creature hung on high, apparently motionless, and 
then fell — a hundred tons of solid flesh — back into the sea. On either 
side of that mountainous mass the waters rose in shining towers of 
snowy foam, which fell in their turn, whirling and eddying around 
us as we tossed and fell like a chip in a whirlpool. Blinded by the 
flying spray, baling for very life to free the boat from the water with 
which she was nearly full, it was some minutes before I was able to 
decide whether we were still uninjured or not. Then I saw, at a little 
distance, the whale lying quietly. As I looked he spouted, and the 
vapor was red with his blood. *' Starn all! " again cried our chief, 
and we retreated to a considerable distance. The old warrior's prac- 
ticed eye had detected the coming climax of our efforts, the dying 
agony or " flurry " of the great mammal. Turning upon his side, 
he began to move in a circular direction, slowly at first, then faster 
and faster, until he was rushing round at tremendous speed, his 
great head raised quite out of water at times, clashing his enormous 
jaws. Torrents of blood poured from his spout-hole, accompanied by 
hoarse bellowings, as of some gigantic bull, but really caused by the 
laboring breath trying to pass through the clogged air passages. The 
utmost caution and rapidity of manipulation of the boat was neces- 
sary to avoid his maddened rush, but this gigantic energy was short- 
lived. In a few minutes he subsided slowly in death, his mighty body 
reclined on one side, the fin uppermost waving limply as he rolled 
to the swell, while the small waves broke gently over the carcass in 



300 THE WORKER AND HIS WORK 

a low, monotonous surf, intensifying the profound silence that had 
succeeded the tumult of our conflict with the late monarch of the 
deep. Hardly had the flurry ceased, when we hauled up alongside 
of our hard-won prize, in order to secure a line to him in a better 
manner than at present for hauling him to the ship. This was effected 
by cutting a hole through the tough, gristly substance of the flukes 
with the short " boat-spade," carried for the purpose. The end of the 
line, cut off from the faithful harpoon that had held it so long, was 
then passed through this hole and made fast. This done, it was 
" Smoke-oh! " The luxury of that rest and refreshment was some- 
thing to be grateful for, coming, as it did, in such complete contrast 
to our recent violent exertions. 

The ship was some three or four miles off to leeward, so we reck- 
oned she would take at least an hour and a half to work up to us. 
Meanwhile, our part of the performance being over, and well over, 
we thoroughly enjoyed ourselves, lazily rocking on the gentle swell by 
the side of a catch worth at least £800. During the conflict I had not 
noticed what now claimed attention — several great masses of white, 
semi-transparent-looking substance floating about, of huge size and 
irregular shape. But one of these curious lumps came floating by as 
we lay, tugged at by several fish, and I immediately asked the mate 
if he could tell me what it was and where it came from. He told me 
that, when dying, the cachalot always ejected the contents of his 
stomach, which were invariably composed of such masses as we saw 
before us; that he believed the stuff to be portions of big cuttle-fish, 
bitten off by the whale for the purpose of swallowing, but he wasn't 
sure. Anyhow, I could haul this piece alongside now, if I liked, and 
see. Secretly wondering at the indifference shown by this officer of 
forty years' whaling experience to such a wonderful fact as appeared 
to be here presented, I thanked him, and, sticking the boat-hook into 
the lump, drew it alongside. It was at once evident that it was a 
massive fragment of cuttle-fish — tentacle or arm — as thick as a stout 
man's body, and with six or seven sucking-discs or acetabula on it. 
These were about as large as a saucer, and on their inner edge were 
thickly set with hooks or claws all round the rim, sharp as needles, 
and almost the shape and size of a tiger's. 

To what manner of awful monster this portion of limb belonged, 
I could only faintly imagine; but of course I remembered, as any 
sailor would, that from my earliest sea-going I had been told that 



ABNER'S WHALE 301 

the cuttle-fish was the biggest in the sea, although I never even 
began to think it might be true until now. I asked the mate if he 
had ever seen such creatures as this piece belonged to alive and kick- 
ing. He answered, languidly, '' Wall, I guess so; but I don't take any 
stock in fish, 'cept for provisions er ile — en thet's a fact." It will be 
readily believed that I vividly recalled this conversation when, many 
years after, I read an account by the Prince of Monaco of his dis- 
covery of a gigantic squid, to which his naturalist gave the name of 
Lepidoteuthis Grimaldii! Truly the indifference and apathy mani- 
fested by whalers generally to everything except commercial matters 
is wonderful — hardly to be credited. However, this was a mighty 
revelation to me. For the first time, it was possible to understand 
that, contrary to the usual notion of a whale's being unable to swallow 
a herring, here was a kind of whale that could swallow — well, a block 
four or five feet square apparently ; who lived upon creatures as large 
as himself, if one might judge of their bulk by the sample to hand; 
but being unable, from only possessing teeth in one jaw, to masticate 
his food, was compelled to tear it in sizable pieces, bolt it whole, and 
leave his commissariat department to do the rest. 

While thus ruminating, the mate and Louis began a desultory 
conversation concerning what they termed " ambergrease." I had 
never even heard the word before, although I had a notion that Milton, 
in " Paradise Regained, " describing the Satanic banquet, had spoken 
of something being " gris-amber steamed." They could by no means 
agree as to what this mysterious substance was, how it was produced, 
or under what conditions. They knew that it was sometimes found 
floating near the dead body of a sperm whale — the mate, in fact, stated 
that he had taken it once from the rectum of a cachalot — and they 
were certain that it was of great value — from one to three guineas 
per ounce. When I got to know more of the natural history of the 
sperm whale, and had studied the literature of the subject, I was no 
longer surprised at their want of agreement, since the learned doctors 
who have written upon the subject do not seem to have come to 
definite conclusions either. 

By some it is supposed to be the product of a diseased condition 
of the creature; others consider that it is merely the excreta, which, 
normally fluid, has by some means become concreted. It is nearly 
always found with cuttle-fish beaks imbedded in its substance, show- 
ing that these indigestible portions of the sperm whale's food have in 



302 THE WORKER AND HIS WORK 

some manner become mixed with it during its formation in the bowel. 
Chemists have analyzed it with scanty results. Its great value is due 
to its property of intensifying the power of perfumes, although, 
strange to say, it has little or no odor of its own, a faint trace of musk 
being perhaps detectable in some cases. 

The ship now neared us fast, and as soon as she rounded-to, we 
left the whale and pulled towards her, paying out line as we went. 
Arriving alongside, the line was handed on board, and in a short 
time the prize was hauled to the gangway. We met with a very 
different reception this time. The skipper's grim face actually 
looked almost pleasant as he contemplated the colossal proportions of 
the latest addition to our stock. He was indeed a fine catch, being 
at least seventy feet long and in splendid condition. As soon as he was 
secured alongside in the orthodox fashion, all hands were sent to 
dinner, with an intimation to look sharp over it. Judging from our 
slight previous experience, there was some heavy labor before us, 
for this whale was nearly four times as large as the one caught off the 
Cape Verds. And it was so. Verily those officers toiled like Titans 
to get that tremendous head off, even the skipper taking a hand. In 
spite of their efforts, it was dark before the heavy job was done. As 
we were in no danger of bad weather, the head was dropped astern 
by a hawser until morning, when it would be safer to dissect it. All 
that night we worked incessantly, ready to drop with fatigue, but not 
daring to suggest the possibility of such a thing. Several of the 
officers and harpooners were allowed a few hours off, as their special 
duty of dealing with the head at daylight would be so arduous as to 
need all their energies. When day dawned we were allowed a short 
rest, while the work of cutting up the head was undertaken by the 
rested men aft. At seven bells (7.30) it was " turn to " all hands 
again. The " junk " was hooked on to both cutting tackles, and the 
windlass manned by everybody who could get hold. Slowly the 
enormous mass rose, canting the ship heavily as it came, while every 
stick and rope aloft complained of the great strain upon them. When 
at last it was safely shipped, and the tackles cast off, the size of this 
small portion of a full-grown cachalot's body could be realized, 
not before. 

It was hauled from the gangway by tackles, and securely lashed 



ABNER'S WHALE 303 

to the rail running round beneath the top of the bulwarks for that 
purpose— the " lash-rail "—where the top of it towered up as high 
as the third ratline of the main-rigging. Then there was another 
spell, while the " case " was separated from the skull. This was too 
large to get on board, so it was lifted half-way out of the water 
by the tackles, one hooked on each side; then they were made 
fast, and a spar rigged across them at a good height above the top 
of the case. A small block was lashed to this spar, through which a 
line was rove. A long, narrow bucket was attached to one end of 
this rope; the other end on deck was attended by two men. One 
unfortunate beggar was perched aloft on the above-mentioned spar, 
where his position, like the mainyard of Marryatt's verbose carpenter, 
was " precarious and not at all permanent." He was provided with 
a pole, with which he pushed the bucket down through a hole cut 
in the upper end of the " case," whence it was drawn out by the chaps 
on deck full of spermaceti. It was a weary, imsatisfactory process, 
wasting a great deal of the substance being baled out; but no other 
way was apparently possible. The grease blew about, drenching 
most of us engaged in an altogether unpleasant fashion, while, to 
mend matters, the old barky began to roll and tumble about in an 
aimless, drunken sort of way, the result of a new cross swell rolling 
up from the south westward. As the stuff was gained, it was poured 
into large tanks in the blubber-room, the quantity being too great to 
be held by the try-pots at once. Twenty-five barrels of this clear, 
wax-like substance were baled from that case; and when at last it was 
lowered a little, and cut away from its supports, it was impossible to 
help thinking that much was still remaining within which we, with 
such rude means, were unable to save. Then came the task of cut- 
ting up the junk. Layer after layer, eight to ten inches thick, was 
sliced off, cut into suitable pieces, and passed into the tanks. So 
full was the matter of spermaceti that one could take a piece as large 
as one's head in the hands, and squeeze it like a sponge, expressing 
the spermaceti in showers, until nothing remained but a tiny ball of 
fiber. All this soft, pulpy mass was held together by walls of ex- 
ceedingly tough, gristly integument (" white horse"), which was as 
difficult to cut as gutta-percha, and, but for the peculiar texture, not 
at all unlike it. 



304 THE WORKER AND HIS WORK 

When we had finished separating the junk, there was nearly a foot 
of oil on deck in the waist, and uproarious was the laughter when 
some hapless individual, losing his balance, slid across the deck and 
sat down with a loud splash in the deepest part of the accumulation. 

The lower jaw of this whale measured exactly nineteen feet in 
length from the opening of the mouth, or, say the last of the teeth, to 
the point, and carried twenty-eight teeth on each side. For the time, 
it was hauled aft out of the way, and secured to the lash-rail. The 
subsequent proceedings were just the same as before described, only 
more so. For a whole week our labors continued, and when they were 
over we had stowed below a hundred and forty-six barrels of mingled 
oil and spermaceti, or fourteen and a half tuns. 

It was really a pleasant sight to see Abner receiving, as if being 
invested with an order of merit, the twenty pounds of tobacco to 
which he was entitled. Poor fellow! he felt as if at last he were going 
to be thought a little of, and treated a little better. He brought his 
bounty forrard, and shared it out as far as it would go with the great- 
est delight and good nature possible. Whatever he might have been 
thought of aft, certainly, for the time, he was a very important per- 
sonage forrard ; even the Portuguese, who were inclined to be jealous 
of what they considered an infringement of their rights, were molli- 
fied by the generosity shown. 

After every sign of the operations had been cleared away, the 
jaw was brought out, and the teeth extracted with a small tackle. 
They were set solidly into a hard white gum, which had to be cut 
away all around them before they would come out. When cleaned 
of the gum, they were headed up in a small barrel of brine. The 
great jaw-pans were sawn off, and placed at the disposal of anybody 
who wanted pieces of bone for " scrimshaw," or carved work. This 
is a very favorite pastime on board whalers, though, in ships such as 
ours, the crew have little opportunity for doing anything, hardly any 
leisure during daylight being allowed. But our carpenter was a 
famous workman at " scrimshaw," and he started half a dozen walk- 
ing-sticks forthwith. A favorite design is to carve the bone into the 
similitude of a rope, with " worming " of smaller line along its lays. 
A handle is caved out of a whale's tooth, and insets of baleen, silver, 
cocoa-tree, or ebony, give variety and finish. The tools used are of 
the roughest. Some old files, softened in the fire, and filed into 



ABNER'S WHALE 305 

grooves something like saw-teeth, are most used; but old knives, 
sail-needles, and chisels are pressed into service. The work turned 
out would, in many cases, take a very high place in an exhibition of 
turnery, though never a lathe was near it. Of course, a long time is 
taken over it, especially the polishing, which is done with oil and 
whiting, if it can be got — powdered pumice if it cannot. I once had 
an elaborate pastry-cutter carved out of six whale's teeth, which I 
purchased for a pound of tobacco from a seaman of the Coral whaler, 
and afterwards sold in Dunedin, New Zealand, for £2 10^., the pur- 
chaser being decidedly of opinion that he had a bargain. 



20 



THE SALMON 
By Rex Beach 

" I DARE say Kalvik is rather lively during the summer season," 
Emerson remarked to Cherry. 

" Yes; the ships arrive in May, and the fish begin to run in July. 
After that nobody sleeps." 

" It must be rather interesting," he observed. 

*'It is more than that; it is inspiring. Why, the story of the salmon 
is an epic in itself. You know they live in a cycle of four years, no 
more, always returning to the waters of their nativity to die; and I 
have heard it said that during one of those four years they disap- 
pear, no one knows where, reappearing out of the mysterious depths 
of the sea as if at a signal. They come by the legion, in countless 
scores of thousands; and when once they have tasted the waters of 
their birth they never touch food again, never cease their onward 
rush until they become bruised and battered wrecks, drifting down 
from the spawning-beds. When the call of nature is answered and 
the spawn is laid, they die. They never seek the salt sea again, but 
carpet the river with their bones. When they feel the homing impulse 
they come from the remotest depths, heading unerringly for the par- 
ticular parent stream whence they originated. If sand-bars should 
block their course in dry seasons or obstacles intercept them, they 
will hurl themselves out of the water in an endeavor to get across. 
They may disregard a thousand rivers, one by one; but when they 
finally taste the sweet currents which flow from their birthplaces their 
whole nature changes, and even their physical features alter: they 
grow thin, and the head takes on the sinister curve of the prey- 
ing bird." 

" I had no idea they acted that way," said Boyd. " You paint a 
vivid picture." 

" That^s because they interest me. As a matter of fact, these 
fisheries are more fascinating than any place I've ever seen. Why, 
you just ought to witness the ' run.' These empty waters become sud- 
denly crowded, and the fish come in a great silver horde, which races 
up, up, up toward death and obliteration. They come with the vio- 
306 



THE SALMON 307 

lence of a summer storm ; like a prodigious gleaming army they swarm 
and bend forward, eager, undeviating, one-purposed. It's quite im- 
possible to describe it — this great silver horde. They are entirely 
defenceless, of course, and almost every living thing preys upon them. 
The birds congregate in millions, the four-footed beasts come down 
irom the hills, the Apaches of the sea harry them in dense droves, 
and even man appears from distant coasts to take his toll; but still 
they pass bravely on. The clank of machinery makes the hills 
rumble, the hiss of steam and the sighs of the soldering-furnaces are 
like the complaint of some giant overgorging himself. The river 
swarms with the fleets of fish-boats, which skim outward with the 
dawn to flit homeward again at twilight and settle like a vast brood 
of white-winged gulls. Men let the hours go by unheeded, and for- 
get to sleep." 

" What sort of men do they hire? " 

" Chinese, Japs, and Italians, mainly. It's like a foreign country 
here, only there are no women. The bunk-rooms are filled with 
opium fumes and noisy with clacking tongues. On one side of the 
village streets the Orientals burn incense to their Joss, across the 
way the Latins worship the Virgin. They work side by side all day 
until they are ready to drop." 

" How long does it all last? " 

" Only about six weeks; then the furnace fires die out, the ships 
are loaded, the men go to sleep, and the breezes waft them out into 
the August haze, after which Kalvik sags back into its ten months' 
coma, becoming, as you see it now, a dead, deserted village, shunned 
by man." 

" Jove! you have a graphic tongue,'^ said Emerson appreciatively. 
" But I don't see how those huge plants can pay for their upkeep 
with such a short run." 

" Well, they do; and, what's more, they pay tremendously; some- 
times a hundred per cent, a year or more." 

" Impossible! " Emerson was now thoroughly aroused, and 
Cherry continued : 

" Two years ago a ship sailed into port in early May loaded with 
an army of men, with machinery, lumber, coal, and so forth. They 
landed, built the plant, and had it ready to operate by the time the 
run started. They made their catch, and sailed away again in August 
with enough salmon in the hold to pay twice over for the whole thing. 



308 THE WORKER AND HIS WORK 

Willis Marsh did even better than that the year before, but of course 
the price of fish was high then. Next season will be another big year." 

" How is that? " 

" Every fourth season the run is large; nobody knows why. Every 
time there is a Presidential election the fish are shy and very scarce; 
that lifts prices. Every year in which a President of the United 
States is inaugurated they are plentiful." 

Boyd laughed. " The Alaska salmon takes more interest in 
politics than I do. I wonder if he is a Republican or Democrat? " 

" Inasmuch as he is a red salmon, I dare say you'd call him a 
Socialist," laughed Cherry. 

Emerson rose, and began to pace back and forth. " And you 
mean to say the history of the other canneries is the same? " 

" Certainly." 

" I had no idea there were such profits in the fisheries up here." 

" Nobody knows it outside of those interested. The Kalvik River 
is the most wonderful salmon river in the world, for it has never failed 
once; that's why the Companies guard it so jealously; that's why 
they denied you shelter. You see, it is set away off here in one 
corner of Behring Sea without means of communication or access, 
and they intend to keep it so." 



The main body of salmon struck the Kalvik River on the first 
day of July. For a week past the run had been slowly growing, 
while the canneries tested themselves; but on the opening day of the 
new month the horde issued boldly forth from the depths of the sea, 
and the battle began in earnest. They came during the hush of the 
dawn, a mad, crowding throng from No Man's Land, to wake the 
tide-rips and people the shimmering reaches of the bay, lashing them 
to sudden life and fury. Outside, the languorous ocean heaved as 
smiling and serene as ever, but within the harbor a wondrous 
change occurred. 

As if in answer to some deep-sea signal, the tides were quickened 
by a coursing multitude, steadfast and unafraid, yet foredoomed to 
die by the hand of man, or else more surely by the serving of their 
destiny. Clad in their argent mail of blue and green, they worked 
the bay to madness; they overwhelmed the waters, surging forward 
in great droves and columns, hesitating only long enough to frolic 



THE SALMON 309 

with the shifting currents, as if rejoicing in their strength and beauty. 

At times they swam with cleaving fins exposed; again they 
churned the placid waters until swift combers raced across the shal- 
low bars like tidal waves, while the deeper channels were shot 
through with the shadowy forms or pierced by the lightning glint of 
silvered belHes. They streamed in with the flood tide to retreat again 
with the ebb, but there was neither haste nor caution in their progress ; 
they had come in answer to the breeding call of the sea, and its 
exultation was upon them, driving them relentlessly onward. They 
had no voice against its overmastering spell. 

Mustering in the early light like a swarm of giant white-winged 
moths, the fishing-boats raced forth with the flowing tide, urged by 
sweep and sail and lusty sinews. Paying out their hundred-fathom 
nets, they drifted over the banks like flocks of resting sea-gulls, only 
to come ploughing back again deep laden with their spoils. Grimy 
tugboats lay beside the traps, shrilling the air with creaking winches 
as they " brailed " the struggling fish, a half- ton at a time, from the 
" pounds," now churned to milky foam by the ever-growing throng 
of prisoners; and all the time the big plants gulped the sea harvest, 
faster and faster, clanking and gnashing their metal jaws, while the 
mounds of salmon lay hip-deep to the crews that fed the butch- 
ering machines. 

The Iron Chink, or mechanical cleaner, is perhaps the most in- 
genious of the many labor-saving devices used in the salmon fisheries. 
It is an awkward-looking, yet very effective contrivance of revolving 
knives and conveyors which seizes the fish whole and delivers it 
cleaned, clipped, cut, and ready to be washed. With superhuman 
dexterity it does the work of twenty lightning-like butchers. 

The time had come for man to take his toll. 

Now dawned a period of feverish activity wherein no one might 
rest short of actual exhaustion. Haste became the cry, and com- 
fort fled. 

Big George, when he had fully grasped the situation, became the 
boss fisherman on the instant; before the others had reached the 
cook-house he was busied in laying out his crews and distributing his 
gear. That night the floors of the fish-dock groaned beneath a weight 
of silver-sided salmon piled waist-high to a tall man. All through 
the cool, dim-lit hours the ranks of Chinese butchers hacked and 
slit and slashed with swift, sure, tireless strokes, while the great build- 



310 THE WORKER AND HIS WORK 

ing echoed hollowly to the clank of machines and the hissing sighs of 
the soldering-furnaces. There before him were thousands of salmon. 
They were strewn in a great mass upon the dock and inside the shed, 
while from the scow beneath they came in showers as the handlers 
tossed them upward from their pues. Through the wide doors he 
saw the backs of the butchers busily at work over their tables, and 
heard the uproar of the cannery running full for the first time. 

" Where did those fish come from? " Emerson asked. 

" From the trap." George smiled as he had not smiled in many 
weeks. " They've struck in like I knew they would, and they're 
running now by the thousands. I've fished these waters for years, 
but I never seen the likes of it. They'll tear that trap to pieces. 
They're smothering in the pot, tons and tons of 'em, with millions 
more milling below the leads because they can't get in. It's a sight 
you'll not see once in a lifetime." 

" That means that we can run the plant — that we'll get all we 
can use? " 

"Yes! We've got fish enough to run two canneries. They've 
struck their gait I tell you, and they'll never stop now night or day 
till they're through. We don't need no gill-netters ; what we need 
is butchers and slimers and handlers. There never was a trap site 
in the North till this one." He flung out a long, hairy arm, bared 
half to the shoulder, and waved it exultantly. " We built this plant 
to cook forty thousand salmon a day, but I'll bring you three thou- 
sand every hour, and you've got to cook 'em. Do you hear? We've 
won, my boy! We've won! " 



RECLAIMING THE DESERT 
By Harold Bell Wright 

In the making of the Desert the canyon carving, delta-building 
river did not count the centuries of its labor; the rock-hewing, beach- 
forming waves did not number the ages of their toil; the burning, 
constant sun and the drying, drifting winds were not careful for 
the years. 

Somewhere in the eternity that lies back of all the yesterdays, 
the great river found the salt waves of the ocean fathoms deep in 
what is now the King's Basin and extending a hundred and seventy 
miles north of the shore that takes their wash to-day. Slowly, through 
the centuries of that age of all beginnings, the river, cutting canyons 
and valleys in the north and carrying southward its load of silt, 
built from the east across the gulf to Lone Mountain a mighty 
delta dam. 

South of this new land the ocean still received the river; to the 
north the gulf became an inland sea. The upper edge of this new- 
born sea beat helpless against a line of low, barren hills beyond 
which lay many miles of a rainless land. Eastward lay yet more 
miles of desolate waste. And between this sea and the parent ocean 
on the west, extending southward past the delta dam, the mountains 
of the Coast Range shut out every moisture-laden cloud and turned 
back every life-bearing stream. Thus trapped and helpless, the 
bright waters, with all their life, fell under the constant, fierce, beat- 
ing rays of the semi-tropical sun and shrank from the wearing sweep 
of the dry, tireless winds. Uncounted still, the centuries of that age 
also passed and the bottom of that sea lay bare, dry and lifeless 
under the burning sky, still beaten by the pitiless sun, still swept 
by the scorching winds. The place that had held the glad waters 
with their teeming life came to be an empty basin of blinding sand, 
of quivering heat, of dreadful death. Unheeding the ruin it had 
wrought, the river swept on its way. 

And so — hemmed in by mountain wall, barren hills and 
rainless plains; forgotten by the ocean; deserted by the river, 

311 



312 THE WORKER AND HIS WORK 

that thirsty land lay, the loneliest, most desolate bit of this great 
Western Continent. 

But the river could not work this ruin without contributing to 
the desert the rich strength it had gathered from its tributary lands. 
Mingled with the sand of the ancient sea-bed was the silt from far- 
away mountain and hill and plain. That basin of Death was more 
than a dusty tomb of a life that had been; it was a sepulchre that 
held the vast treasure of a life that would be — ^would be when the 
ages should have made also the master men, who would dare say to 
the river: " Make restitution! " — men who could, with power, com- 
mand the rich life within the tomb to come forth. 

But master men are not the product of years — scarcely, indeed, 
of centuries. The master passions, the governing instincts, the lead- 
ing desires and the driving fears that hew and carve and form and 
fashion the race are as reckless of the years as are wave and river 
and sun and wind. Therefore, the forgotten land held its wealth until 
Time should make the giants that could take it. 

In the centuries of those forgotten ages that went into the 
making of The King's Basin Desert, the families of men grew 
slowly into tribes, the tribes grew slowly into nations and the nations 
grew slowly into worlds. New worlds became old; and other new 
worlds were discovered, explored, developed and made old; war and 
famine and pestilence and prosperity hewed and formed, carved 
and built and fashioned, even as wave and river and sun and wind. 
The kingdoms of earth, air and water yielded up their wealth as 
men grew strong to take it; the elements bowed their necks to his 
yoke, to fetch and carry for him as he grew wise to order; the wilder- 
ness fled, the mountains lay bare their hearts, the waste places paid 
tribute as he grew brave to command. 

Across the wide continent the tracks of its wild life were trodden 
out by the broad cattle trails, the paths of the herds were marked 
by the wheels of immigrant wagons and the roads of the slow-moving 
teams became swift highways of steel. In the East the great cities 
that received the hordes from every land were growing ever greater. 
On the far west coast the crowded multitude was building even as 
it was building in the East. In the Southwest savage race suc- 
ceeded savage race, until at last the slow-footed padres overtook 
the swift-footed Indian and the rude civilization made possible by 
the priests in turn ran down the priest. 



RECLAIMING THE DESERT 313 

About the land of my story, forgotten under the dry sky, this 
ever-restless, ever-swelling tide of life swirled and eddied — swirled 
and eddied, but touched it not. On the west it swept even to the 
foot of the grim mountain wall. On the east one far-flung ripple 
reached even to the river — when Rubio City was born. But the 
Desert waited, silent and hot and fierce in its desolation, holding its 
treasures under the seal of death against the coming of the strong 
ones; waited until the man-making forces that wrought through 
those long ages should have done also their work; waited for this 
age — for your age and mine — for the age of the Seer and his com- 
panions — for the days of my story, the days of Barbara and 
her friends. 



The Seer's expedition, returning from the south, made camp on 
the bank of the Rio Colorado twenty miles below Rubio City. It 
was the last night out. Supper was over, and the men, with their 
pipes and cigarettes, settled them.selves in various careless attitudes 
of repose after the long day. Their sunburned faces, toughened fig- 
ures and worn, desert-stained clothing testified to their weeks of toil 
in the open air under the dry sky of an almost rainless land. Some 
were old-timers — veterans of many a similar campaign. Two were 
new recruits on their first trip. All were strong, clean-cut, vigorous 
specimens of intelligent, healthy manhood, for in all professions, not 
excepting the army and navy, there can be found no finer body of 
men than our civil engineers. 

Day after day they rode from sunrise until dark; studying the land, 
estimating distances and grades, observing the courses of the chan- 
nels cut by the overflow and the marks of high water, noting the 
character of the soil and vegetation; sometimes together, sometimes 
separated ; with Jose to select their camping places and to help them 
with his Indian knowledge of the country. 

And always at night, after the long hard day, when supper — 
cooked by their own hands — was over, with pipe and cigarettes they 
reviewed their observations and compared notes, summing up the 
results before rolling in their blankets to sleep under the stars. 

Some day, perhaps, v/hen the world is much older and very much 
wiser, Civilization will erect a proper monument to the memory of 
such men as these. But just now Civilization is too greedily quar- 



314 THE WORKER AND HIS WORK 

reling over its newly acquired wealth to acknowledge its debt of honor 
to those who made this wealth possible. 

But the Seer and his companion concerned themselves with no 
such thoughts as these. They thought only of the possibility of con- 
verting the thousands of acres of The King's Basin Desert into pro- 
ductive farms. For this they conceived to be their work. 

They had worked across the Basin to Lone Mountain and back 
to the river to a point pearly opposite the clump of cottonwoods where 
they had left the expedition. To-morrow night they would be in 
Rubio City. 

" Abe," said the Seer, " our intake would go in right here. We 
could follow the old channel of Dry River, with our canal about 
twenty miles out, put in a heading and lead off our mains and laterals.'' 



The party that was to make the first survey in the Desert was 
being formed and equipped under the direction of Abe Lee. Horses, 
mules, wagons, camp outfits and supplies, with Indian and Mexican 
laborers, teamsters of several nationalities and here and there a 
Chinese cook, were assembled. Toward the last from every part 
of the great Western country came the surveyors and engineers — 
sunburned, khaki-clad men most of them, toughened by their out-of- 
door life, overflowing with health and good spirits. They hailed one 
another joyously and greeted Abe with extravagant delight, over- 
whelming him with questions. For the word had gone out that the 
Seer, beloved by all the tribe, and his lieutenant, almost equally be- 
loved, were making " big medicine " in The King's Basin Desert. 
Not a man of them would have exchanged his chance to go for a 
crown and sceptre. 

Slowly, day by day, the surveying party under the Seer pushed 
deeper and deeper into the awful desolation of The King's Basin 
Desert. They were the advance force of a mighty army ordered 
ahead by Good Business — the master passion of the race. Their 
duty was to learn the strength of the enemy, to measure its resources, 
to spy out its weaknesses and to gather data upon which a campaign 
would be planned. 

Under the Seer the expedition was divided into several smaller 
parties, each of which was assigned to certain defined districts. 



RECLAIMING THE DESERT 315 

Here and there, at seemingly careless intervals in the wide expanse, 
the white tents of the division camps shone through the many col- 
ored veils of the desert. Tall, thin colmuns of dust lifted into the 
sky from the water wagons that crawled ceaselessly from water hole 
to camp and from camp to water hole — hung in long clouds above 
the supply train laboring heavily across the dun plain to and from 
Rubio City — or rose in quick puffs and twisting spirals from the feet 
of some saddle horse bearing a messenger from the Chief to some 
distant lieutenant. 

Every morning, from each of the camps, squads of khaki-clad 
men bearing transit and level, stake and pole and flag — the weapons 
of their warfare — ^put out in different directions into the vast silence 
that seemed to engulf them. Every evening the squads returned, 
desert-stained and weary, to their rest under the lonesome stars. 
Every morning the sun broke fiercely up from the long level of the 
eastward plain to pour its hot strength down upon these pigmy crea- 
tures, who dared to invade the territory over which he had, for so 
many ages, held undisputed dominion. Every evening the sun 
plunged fiercely down behind the purple wall of mountains that shut 
in the Basin on the west, as if to gather strength in some nether 
world for to-morrow's fight. 

Always there was the same flood of white light from the deep, 
dry sky that was uncrossed by shred of cloud ; always the same wide, 
tawny waste, harshly glaring near at hand — filled with awful mys- 
teries under the many colored mists of the distance; until the eyes 
ached and the soul cried out in wonder at it all. Always there were 
the same deep nights, with the lonely stars so far away in the velvet 
purple darkness; the soft breathing of the desert; the pungent smell 
of greasewood and salt-bush; the weird, quavering call of the ground 
owl; or the wild coyote chorus, as if the long lost spirits of long 
ago savage races cried out a dreadful warning to these invaders. 

And in all of this the land made itself felt against these men in 
the silent menace, the still waiting, the subtle call, the promise, the 
threat and the challenge of La Palma de la Mano de Dios. 

These lines of stakes that every day stretched farther and farther 
into and across the waste seemed, in the wideness of the land, piti- 
fully foolish. Looking back over the lines, the men who set them 
could scarcely distinguish the way they had come. But they knew 



316 THE WORKER AND HIS WORK 

that the stakes were there. They knew that some day that other, 
mightier company, the main army, would move along the way they 
had marked to meet the strength of the barren waste with the 
strength of the great river and take for the race the wealth of the 
land. The sound of human voices was fiat and ineffectual in that 
age-old solitude, but the speakers knew that following their feeble 
voices would come the shouting, ringing, thundering chorus of the 
life that was to follow them into that silent land of death. 

Somewhere in those forgotten ages that went into the making of 
The King's Basin Desert, a company of free-born citizens of the land, 
moved by that master passion — Good Business — found their way to 
the banks of the Colorado. In time Good Business led them to build 
their pueblos and to cultivate their fields by irrigation with water 
from the river and erect their rude altars to their now long-forgotten 
gods. Driven by the same passion that drove the Indians, the 
emigrant wagons moved toward the new gold country, and some 
financial genius saw Good Business at the river-crossing near the site 
of the ancient city. At first it was no more than a ferry, but soon 
others with eyes for profit established a trading point where the 
overland voyagers could replenish their stock of supplies, sure to be 
low after the hundreds of miles across the wide plains. Then also, 
in obedience to Good Business, pleasures heard the call, saloons, 
gambling houses and dance halls appeared, and for profit the joys 
of civilization arrived in the savage land. Good Business sent the 
prospectors who found the mines, the capital that developed them 
and the laborers who dug the ore. Good Business sent the cattle 
barons and their cowboys, sent the speculators and the pioneer 
merchants. Good Business sent also, in the fullness of time, 
Jefferson Worth. 

Of old New England Puritan stock. Worth had come through the 
hard life of a poor farm boy with two dominant elements in his 
character: an almost superhuman instinct for Good Business, in- 
herited no doubt, and an instinct, also inherited, for religion. The 
instinct for trade, from much cultivation, had waxed strong and 
stronger with the years. The religion that he had from his fore- 
fathers was become little more than a superstition. It was his genius 
for business that led him, in his young manhood, to leave the farm, 
and it was inevitable that from making money he should come to 



RECLAIMING THE DESERT 317 

making money make more money. It was the other dominant ele- 
ment in his character that kept him scrupulously honest, scrupu- 
lously moral. Besides this, honesty and morality were also 
" good business." 

Seeking always larger opportunities for the employment of his 
small, steadily-increasing financial strength, Mr. Worth established 
the Pioneer Bank. Later, as he had foreseen, the same master pas- 
sion brought the great railroad with still larger opportunities for his 
money to m^ake more money. And now the same master passion 
that had driven the Indian, the emigrant, the miner, the cowman, 
the banker and the railroad was driving the eastern capitalists to 
spend their moneyed strength in the reclamation of The King's Basin 
Desert. It was Good Business that called to Jefferson Worth now as 
he saw the immense possibilities of the land. 

As truly as the ages had made the barren desert with its hard, 
thirsty life, the ages had produced Jefferson Worth, a carefully per- 
fected, money-making machine, as silent, hard and lonely as the 
desert itself. With apparently no vices, no passions, no mistakes, 
no failures, his only relation to his fellow-men was a business relation. 
With his almost supernatural ability to foresee, to measure, to weigh 
and judge, with his cold, mask-like face and his manner of considering 
carefully every word and of placing a value upon every trivial inci- 
dent, he was respected, feared, trusted, even admired^ — and that was 
all. No; not all. By those who were forced, through circumstances — 
business circumstances — to contribute to his prosperity and financial 
success, he was hated. Such is the unreasonableness of human kind. 

Business, to this man as to many of his kind, was not the mean, 
sordid grasping and hoarding of money. It was his profession, but it 
was even more than a profession ; it was the expression of his genius. 
Still more it was, through him, the expression of the age in which he 
lived, the expression of the master passion that in all ages had 
wrought in the making of the race. He looked upon a successful 
deal as a good surgeon looks upon a successful operation, as an 
architect upon the completion of a building or an artist upon his 
finished picture. But to a greater degree than to artist or surgeon, 
the success of his work was measured by the accumulation of dollars. 
Apart from his work he valued the money received from his opera- 
> tions no more than the surgeon his fee, the artist his price. The work 



318 THE WORKER AND HIS WORK 

itself was his passion. Because dollars were the tools of his craft 
he was careful of them. The more he succeeded, the more power 
he gained for greater success. 

The work of the expedition was nearly finished. The banker 
knew now from the results of the survey and from his own careful 
observations and estimates that the Seer's dream was not only pos- 
sible from an engineering point of view, but from the careful capital- 
ist's standpoint would justify a large investment. Lying within the 
lines of the ancient beach and thus below the level of the great river, 
were hundreds of thousands of acres equal in richness of soil to 
the famous delta lands of the Nile. The bringing of the water from 
the river and its distribution through a system of canals and ditches, 
while a work of great magnitude requiring the expenditure of large 
sums of money, was, as an engineering problem, comparatively simple. 

As Jefferson Worth gazed at the wonderful scene, a vision of the 
changes that were to come to that land passed before him. He saw 
first, following the nearly completed work of the engineers, an army 
of men beginning at the river and pushing out into the desert with 
their canals, bringing with them the life-giving water. Soon, with 
the coming of the water, would begin the coming of the settlers. 
Hummocks would be levelled, washes and arroyos filled, ditches 
would be made to the company canals, and in place of the thin 
growth of gray-green desert vegetation with the ragged patches of 
dun earth would come great fields of luxuriant alfalfa, billowing acres 
of grain, with miles upon miles of orchards, vineyards and groves. 
The fierce desert life would give way to the herds and flocks and the 
home life of the farmer. The railroad would stretch its steel strength 
into this new world; towns and cities would come to be where now 
was only solitude and desolation ; and out from this world-old treasure 
house vast wealth would pour to enrich the peoples of tlie earth. The 
wealth of an empire lay in that land under the banker's eye, and 
Capital held the key. 

But while the work of the engineers was simple, it would be a 
great work; and it was the magnitude of the enterprise and the con- 
sequent requirement of large sums of money that gave Capital its 
opportunity. Without water the desert was worthless. With water 
the productive possibilities of that great territory were enormous. 
Without Capital the water could not be had. Therefore, Capital 



RECLAIMING THE DESERT 319 

was master of the situation and, by controlling the water, could exact 
royal tribute from the wealth of the land. 

With the coming of the water also, the stream of human life 
that flowed into the Basin was swollen by hundreds of settlers driven 
by the master passion — Good Business — to toil and traffic, to build 
the city, to subdue and cultivate the land and thus to realize the 
Seer's dream, while the engineer himself was banished from the work 
to which he had given his life. Every sunrise saw new tent-houses 
springing up on the claims of the settlers around the Company town 
and new buildings beginning in the center of it all — Kingston. Every 
sunset saw miles of new ditches ready to receive the water from the 
canal and acres of new land cleared and graded for irrigation. 

As the trying months of the semi-tropical summer approached, 
the great Desert, so awful in its fierce desolation, so pregnant with 
the life it was still so reluctant to yield, gathered all its dreadful 
forces to withstand the inflowing streams of human energy. In the 
fierce winds that rushed through the mountain passes and swept 
across the hot plains like a torrid furnace blast; in the blinding, 
stinging, choking, smothering dust that moved in golden clouds from 
rim to rim of the Basin; in the hot sky, without shred or raveling 
of cloud; in the creeping, silent, poison life of insect and reptile; in 
the maddening dryness of the thirsty vegetation ; in the weird, beauti- 
ful falseness of the ever-changing mirage, the spirit of the Desert 
issued its silent challenge: the silent, sinister, menacing threat of a 
desolation that had conquered by cruel waiting and that lay in wait 
still to conquer. 

With grim determination, nervous energy, enduring strength and 
a dogged tenacity of purpose, the invading flood of humanity, irre- 
sistibly driven by that master passion, Good Business, matched its 
strength against that of the Desert in the season of its greatest power. 

Steadily mile by mile, acre by acre, and at times almost foot by 
foot, the pioneers wrested their future farms and homes from the 
dreadful forces that had held them for ages. Steadily, with the in- 
flowing stream of life from the world beyond the Basin's rim, the 
area of improved lands about Kingston extended and the work in the 
Company's town went on. By midsummer many acres of alfalfa, 
with Egyptian corn and other grains, showed broad fields of living 
green cut into the dull, dun plain of the Desert and laced with silver 
threads of water shining in the sun. 



320 THE WORKER AND HIS WORK 

In obedience to its master passion — Good Business— the race now 
began pouring its life into the barren wastes of The King^s 
Basin Desert. 

At Deep Well (which is no well at all) on the rim of the Basin, 
trainloads of supplies, implements, machinery, lumber and construc- 
tion material, horses, mules and men were daily side-tracked and 
unloaded on the desert sands. Overland travelers gazed in startled 
wonder at the scene of stirring activity that burst so suddenly upon 
them in the midst of the barren land through which they had ridden 
for hours without sight of a human habitation or sign of man. The 
great mountain of goods, piled on the dun plain ; the bands of horses 
and mules; the camp-fires; the blankets spread on the bare ground; 
the men moving here and there in seemingly hopeless confusion — all 
looked so ridiculously out of place and so pitifully helpless. 

Every hour companies of men with teams and vehicles set out from 
the camp to be swallowed up in the silent distance. Night and day 
the huge mountain of goods was attacked by the freighters who, with 
their big wagons drawn by six, eight, twelve, or more, mules, appeared 
mysteriously out of the weird landscape as if they were spirits ma- 
terialized by some mighty unknown genii of the desert. Their heavy 
wagons loaded, their water barrels filled, they turned again to the 
unseen realm from which they had been summoned. The sound of 
the loud voices of the drivers, the creaking of the wagons, the jingle 
of harness, the shot-like reports of long whips died quickly away; 
while, to the vision, the outfits passed slowly — fading, dissolving in 
their great clouds of dust, in to the land of mystery. 

A year from the beginning of the work at the intake of the river, 
water was turned into the canals. With the coming of the water, 
Kingston changed, almost between suns, from a rude supply camp to 
an established town with post-office, stores, hotel, blacksmith shop, 
livery stables, all in buildings more or less substantial. Town site 
companies quickly laid out new towns, while in the town already 
established new business blocks and dwellings sprang up as if some 
Aladdin had rubbed his lamp. Real estate values advanced to 
undreamed figures and the property was sold, resold and sold again. 
And Kingston, Texas Joe said, " went plumb locoed." 

The name of Jefferson Worth was on every tongue. Was not 
he the wizard who commanded prosperity and wealth to wait upon 
The King's Basin? Was he not the Aladdin who rubbed the lamp? 



APPROACH TO DULUTH, THE LAND OF WORK AND BEAUTY 

The lines of the winding waterways, each leading to a furnace, a mill, an elevator, are 
simply beautiful and the color absolutely lovely. This is the modem landscape — a 
landscape that Claude would have loved. All his composition is in it — only the mills 
have replaced the palaces, the trestle the acqueduct; instead of the stone pine there 
stands the water tower; instead of the cypress, the automatic signal; instead of the cross 
the trolley pole. Soon, however, all this will go — the mystery of the smoke will vanish 
in the clearness of electricity, and the mystery of the trestle in the plainness of the con- 
crete bridge. But it is here now, and the thing is to delight in it. Artists don't see 
it — and the railroad men who have made it don't know any more than the Greeks 
what a marvellous thing they have made. 



^*':/.v4 



&, 



^.'*- 





APPROACH TO DULUTH. BY JOSEPH PENNELL 



RECLAIMING THE DESERT 321 

The methods of capital are impersonal, inhuman — the methods 
of a force governed by laws as fixed as the laws of nature, neither 
cruel nor kind; inconsiderate of man's misery or happiness, his life 
or death; using man for its own ends — ^profit, as men use water and 
soil and sun and air. The methods of Jefferson Worth were the 
methods of a man laboring with his brother men, sharing their hard- 
ships, sharing their returns; a man using money as a workman uses 
his tools to fashion and build and develop, adding thus to the welfare 
of human kind. 



21 



THE CHILD-MAN 
By Arnold Bennett 

The man Darius was first taken to work by his mother. It was 
the winter of 1835, January. They passed through the market-place 
of the town of Turnhill, where they lived. Turnhill lies a couple of 
miles north of Bursley. One side of the market-place was barricaded 
with stacks of coal, and the other with loaves of a species of rye 
and straw bread. This coal and these loaves were being served out 
by meticulous and haughty officials, all invisibly braided with red- 
tape, to a crowd of shivering, moaning, and weeping wretches, men, 
women and children — the basis of the population of Turnhill. Al- 
though they were all endeavoring to make a noise, they made scarcely 
any noise, from mere lack of strength. Nothing could be heard, 
under the implacable bright sky, but faint ghosts of sound, as though 
people were sighing and crying from within the vacuum of a huge 
glass bell. 

The next morning, at half -past five, Darius began his career in 
earnest. He was " mold-runner " to a " muffin-maker," a muffin 
being not a comestible but a small plate, fashioned by its maker on a 
mold. The business of Darius was to run as hard as he could with 
the mold, and a newly-created plate adhering thereto, into the drying- 
stove. This " stove " was a room lined with shelves, and having a 
red-hot stove and stove-pipe in the middle. As no man of seven 
could reach the upper shelves, a pair of steps was provided for Darius, 
and up these he had to scamper. Each mold with its plate had to be 
leaned carefully against the wall, and if the soft clay of a new-born 
plate was damaged, Darius was knocked down. The atmosphere 
outside the stove was chill, but owing to the heat of the stove, 
Darius was obliged to work half naked. His sweat ran down his 
cheeks, and down his chest, and down his back, making white chan- 
nels, and lastly it soaked his hair. 

When there were no molds to be sprinted into the drying-stove. 

From Clayhanger, by Arnold Bennett. Copyright, 1910, by George H. 
Doran, Publisher. 
322 



THE CHILD-MAN 323 

and no molds to be carried less rapidly out, Darius was engaged in 
clay-wedging. That is to say, he took a piece of raw clay weighing 
more than himself, cut it in two with a wire, raised one half above 
his head and crashed it down with all his force upon the other half; 
and he repeated the process until the clay was thoroughly soft and 
even in texture. At a later period it was discovered that hydraulic 
machinery could perform this operation more easily and more effectu- 
ally than the brawny arms of a man of seven. At eight o'clock in the 
evening Darius was told that he had done enough for that day, and 
that he must arrive at five sharp the next morning to light the fire, 
before his master the muffin-maker began to work. When he inquired 
how he was to light the fire his master kicked him jovially on the 
thigh and suggested that he should ask another mold-runner. His 
master was not a bad man, at heart, it was said, but on Tuesdays, 
after Sunday and Saint Monday, masters were apt to be capricious. 

Darius reached home at a quarter to nine, having eaten nothing 
but bread all day. Somehow he had lapsed into the child again. His 
mother took him on her knee, and wrapped her sacking apron round 
his ragged clothes, and cried over him and cried over his supper of 
porridge, and undressed him and put him to bed. But he could not 
sleep easily because he was afraid of being late the next morning. 

IT 

And the next morning, wandering about the yards of the manufac- 
tory, in a storm of icy sleet a little before five o'clock, he learned 
from a more experienced companion that nobody would provide him 
with kindling for his fire, that on the contrary everybody who hap- 
pened to be on the place at that hour would unite to prevent him 
from getting kindling, and that he must steal it or expect to be 
thrashed before six o'clock. Near them a vast kiln of ware in 
process of firing showed a white flaming glow at each of its mouths 
in the black winter darkness. Darius's mentor crept up to the arch- 
way of the great hovel which protected the kiln, and pointed like a 
conspirator to the figure of the guardian fireman dozing near his 
monster. The boy had the handle-less remains of an old spade, and 
with it he crept into the hovel, dangerously abstracted fire from one 
of the scorching mouths, and fled therewith; and the fireman never 
stirred. Then Darius, to whom the mentor kindly lent his spade, 



324 THE WORKER AND HIS WORK 

attempted to do the same, but being inexpert woke the fireman, who 
held him spellbound by his roaring voice and then flung him like 
a sack of potatoes bodily into the slush of the yard, and the spade 
after him. Happily the mentor, whose stove was now alight, lent 
fire to Darius, so that Darius's stove, too, was cheerfully burning 
when his master came. And Darius was too excited to feel fatigue. 

By six o'clock on Saturday night Darius had earned a shilling for 
his week's work. But he could only possess himself of the shilling by 
going to a magnificent public-house with his master the muffin-maker. 
This was the first time that he had ever been inside of a public-house. 
The place was crowded with men, women and children eating the 
most lovely hot rolls and drinking beer, in an atmosphere exquisitely 
warm. And behind a high counter a stout jolly man was counting 
piles and piles and piles of silver. Darius's master, in company with 
other boys' masters, gave this stout man four sovereigns to change, 
and it was an hour before he changed them. Meanwhile Darius was 
instructed that he must eat a roll Hike the rest, together with cheese. 
Never had he tasted anything so luscious. He had a match with 
his mentor, as to which of them could spin out his roll the longer, 
honestly chewing all the time ; and he won. Someone gave him half 
a glass of beer. At half-past seven he received his shilling, which 
consisted of a sixpenny piece and four pennies; and, leaving the gay 
public-house, pushed his way through a crowd of tearful women with 
babies in their arms at the doors, and went home. And such was the 
attraction of the Sunday School that he was there the next morning, 
with scented hair, two minutes before the opening. 



in 

In about a year Darius's increasing knowledge of the world 
enabled him to rise in it. He became a handle-maker, in another 
manufactory, and also he went about with the pride of one who could 
form the letters of the alphabet with a pen. In his new work he had 
to put a bit of clay between two molds and then force the top mold 
on to the bottom one by means of his stomach, which it was necessary 
to press downwards and at the same time to wriggle with a peculiar 
movement. The workman to whom he was assigned, his new " mas- 
ter," attached these handles, with strange rapid skill, to beer-mugs. 
For Darius the labor was much lighter than that of mold-running 



THE CHILD-MAN 325 

and clay-wedging, and the pay was somewhat higher. But there 
were minor disadvantages. He descended by twenty steps to his toil, 
and worked in a long cellar which never received any air except by 
way of the steps and a passage, and never any daylight at all. 
Its sole illumination was a stove used for drying. The " throwers' " 
and the " turners' " rooms were also subterranean dungeons. When 
in full activity all these stinking cellars were full of men, boys, and 
young women, working close together in a hot twilight. Certain 
boys were trained contrabandists of beer, and beer came as steadily 
into the dungeons as though it had been laid on by a main pipe. 

But perhaps the worst drawback of Darius's new position was 
the long and irregular hours, due partly to the influences of Saint 
Monday, and partly to the fact that the employees were on piece- 
work and entirely unhampered by grandmotherly legislation. The 
result was that six days' work was generally done in four. And as 
the younger the workman the earlier he had to start in the morning, 
Darius saw scarcely enough of his bed. It was not, of course, to be 
expected that a self-supporting man of the world should rigorously 
confine himself to an eight-hour day or even a twelve-hour day, but 
Darius's day would sometimes stretch to eighteen and nineteen 
hours: which on hygienic grounds could not be unreservedly defended. 



IV 

One Tuesday evening his master, after three days of debauch, 
ordered him to be at work at three o'clock the next morning. He 
quickly and even eagerly agreed, for he was already intimate with 
his master's rope-lash. He reached home at ten o'clock on an autumn 
night, and went to bed and to sleep. He woke up with a start, in the 
dark. There was no watch nor clock in the house, from which nearly 
all the furniture had gradually vanished, but he knew it must be 
already after three o'clock; and he sprang up and rushed out. Of 
course, he had not undressed; his life was too strenuous for mere 
formalities. The stars shone above him as he ran along, wondering 
whether after all, though late, he could by unprecedented effort make 
the ordained number of handles before his master tumbled into the 
cellar at five o'clock. 

When he had run a mile he met some sewage men on their rounds, 
who in reply to his question told him that the hour was half after 



326 THE WORKER AND HIS WORK 

midnight. He dared not risk a return to home and bed, for within 
two and a half hours he must be at work. He wandered aimlessly 
over the surface of the earth until he came to a tile-works, more or 
less unenclosed, whose primitive ovens showed a glare. He ventured 
within, and in spite of himself sat down on the ground near one of 
those heavenly ovens. And then he wanted to get up again, for he 
could feel the strong breath of his enemy, sleep. But he could not 
get up. In a state of terror he yielded himself to his enemy. Shame- 
ful cowardice on the part of a man now aged nine! God, however, 
is merciful, and sent to him an angel in the guise of a night-watchman, 
who kicked him into wakefulness and off the place. He ran on 
limping, beneath the stellar systems, and reached his work at half- 
past four o'clock. 

Although he had never felt so exhausted in his long life, he set 
to work with fury. Useless! When his master arrived he had 
scarcely got through the preliminaries. He dully faced his master in 
the narrow stifling cellar, lit by candles impaled on nails and already 
peopled by the dim figures of boys, girls, and a few men. His master 
was of taciturn habit and merely told him to kneel down. He knelt. 
Two bigger boys turned hastily from their work to snatch a glimpse of 
the affair. The master moved to the back of the cellar and took 
from a box a piece of rope an inch thick and clogged with clay. At 
the same moment a companion offered him, in silence, a tin can with 
a slim neck, out of which he drank deep; it contained a pint of 
porter owing on loan from the previous day. When the master came 
in due course with the rope to do justice upon the sluggard he found 
the lad fallen forward and breathing heavily and regularly. Darius 
had gone to sleep. He was awakened with some violence, but the 
public opinion of the dungeon saved him from a torn shirt and a 
bloody back. 

This was Darius's last day on a pot-bank. The next morning 
he and his went in procession to the Bastile, as the place was called. 
His father, having been too prominent and too independent in a 
strike, had been black-listed by every manufacturer in the district; 
and Darius, though nine, could not keep the family. 



THE '' RED-INK SQUAD " 
By Harvey Jerrold O'Higgins 

When the new chief took charge of the uniformed force of the 
fire department, he swept its veterans into retirement with a broom. 
The " probationers " crowded in to fill the vacancies, and in three 
months Captain Meaghan found himself, as he said, sourly, " teachin' 
kindergarten " in the truck-house of Hook and Ladder Company- 
No. 0. He ruled a shabby red-brick building of three stories that 
stood between the knees of two downtown wholesale houses in a 
warehouse district where " packing-case fires " gave the men the 
worst of " punishment " and the best of training. It followed that 
the captain's roll had more probationers and new men on it than 
any other; and because the names of the probationers were entered 
in red ink, these " raw recruits were nicknamed, in contempt, the 
" red-ink squad." 

They were teased and bullied by the older men. They quarreled 
among themselves, disturbing the club quiet of the truck-house 
leisure; and they were despised by their captain, who demanded of 
his new assistant, " Where'll I be if I run into a big blaze with a 
gang like that? " 

He spoke as if he held Lieutenant Gallegher personally responsible 
for the condition of the crew. Gallegher tried to flatter him with 
an assurance that the chief sent the green men to him as a good 
master. " There's Brodrick has the same sort of district," he said, 
" and he doesn't get them." 

Captain Meaghan replied, curtly: " He breaks their backs." 

Gallegher rubbed his chin. "They're not so bad, taking them 
singly," he considered, " but there's too many of them. And those 
two Guinnys were a double dose too much." (He referred to two 
Italians — one of whom was called " Dan Jordan " by the men, be- 
cause his name was " Giovanni Giordano " and he was good-natured; 
and the other was maliciously miscalled " Spaghetti," because his 

From The Smoke-Eaters, by Harvey J. O'Higgins. Copyright, 1905, 
by The Century Co., Publishers. 

327 



328 THE WORKER AND HIS WORK 

name was unpronounceable, and he turned black when he got 
this substitute.) 

" They'll be sendin' me Chinese next/^ Captain Meaghan 
growled, unmollified. 

" They will," the lieutenant said, " as soon as the Chinks begin 
to vote." 

Captain Meaghan chose to resent that shot at the powers that 
ruled the department. " Well," he blustered, " I wish yuh'd get into 
a ' worker,' so's if yuh're the stuff that makes firemen I'd know it; 
an' if y' aint, the chief'd know it — an' cut it out." 

And he had his wish. 

The alarm of the Torrance fire was rung in just before daybreak 
on a warm midsummer morning, while the men still lay sleeping in 
their bunk-room under the glowworm glimmer of a lowered gas-jet. 
They leaped from their cots with the simultaneous suddenness of the 
start in an obstacle race at the crack of the pistol, tugged on their 
" turnouts " of rubber boots and trousers with a muttering of growls 
and imprecations, vaulted beds while still hooking their waistband 
catches, threw themselves at the brass sliding-poles in the corners, 
and shot down into the glare and noise and seeming disorder of the 
ground floor, where the horses were already tossing their great heads 
in their harness, and the driver was already bending forward in his 
seat, and the doors stood open on the darkness of the night. 

Captain Meaghan sprang into the light rig in which the absent 
battalion chief rode to fires, and swung out into the street with a 
sudden clatter of hoofs on the stone sidewalk and the burst and echo 
of a jangling gong in the dead quiet out-of-doors. The truck fol- 
lowed — fifteen seconds after the '' jigger " had started the alarm — 
with little " Spaghetti " climbing in over the tail of the bed-ladders 
behind " Long Tom " Donnelly, who had the " tiller " of the 
hind wheels. 

That was a good start. But it was only the start. The driver was 
a new man, who was not new to driving, but who was new to driving 
a hook-and-ladder truck. He had been a coachman, and he knew 
all about horses; but for the seat of a five- ton truck a man needs 
the nerve of a chauffeur and the shoulders of a Roman chariot-racer; 
and he does not need to know a bridle from a belly-band. And 
before they had rounded their second corner, Donnelly, on the tiller, 



THE " RED-INK SQUAD " 329 

was braced and ready for the turn at a gallop that might be a run 
on the rocks for him. 

It came within sight of the fire. The horses were already beyond 
control when the piping wail of a " steamer " sounded in their ears 
from a side street ; the driver tugged and shouted ; three white horses 
with a shining engine leaped out of the darkness ahead of them, and 
Donnelly, with a great oath, wrenched the wheel of his tiller around 
to send the rear of the hook-and-ladder truck swinging for a lamp- 
post on the curb. The crash broke the rear running-gear, and 
brought down the truck on the cobblestones, hamstrung. The engine 
flashed past them, dropping fire. 

The collision had been averted, but little " Spaghetti " had been 
thrown out on the stone pavement, and lay curled up on a sidewalk 
grating with a broken body. Donnelly crawled out from the ladders, 
his right arm hanging limp. The other men were unhurt. They had 
braced themselves against the shock by clinging to the side ladders; 
and, moreover, they had not received the terrific momentum of the 
full swing. They were on their feet about the fallen " nigh " horse 
when Lieutenant Gallegher called out to them to follow him on foot 
with such scaling-ladders, hooks, and axes as they could carry; and 
they stormed the truck for tools. Donnelly and " Dan Jordan " lifted 
" Spaghetti " between them and carried him to a bed of life-lines 
covered with a coat. The crew disappeared around the corner, run- 
ning heavily in their rubber boots. " Be off now," Donnelly ordered 
the Italian, and "Dan Jordan " followed the others reluctantly, look- 
ing back at his unconscious countryman as he turned into the 
side street. 

Now, the first truck company to arrive at a fire makes an entrance 
at doors and windows, and incidentally saves whatever lives are in 
danger; the second forces its way through an adjoining building to 
open smoke-vents in the roof; the third is scattered wherever its 
assistance is most needed, to help the engine crews in " stretching in " 
new lines of hose, to tear down burning woodwork, to carry ladders 
and wield forcible-entrance tools in the secondary movements which 
are made against a fire after its position has been developed. The 
accident which wrecked Gallegher's truck brought up Company 
No. 0, the third crew to arrive where it should have been the first. 



330 THE WORKER AND HIS WORK 

And that was how the probationers came to be separated from their 
elders, to face their trial in a body and alone. 

Captain Meaghan was already raging at the disgrace which their 
delay brought to him, and the danger which it brought to the first 
unsupported engine companies that had gone in against the fire. 
When he saw his men straggling in afoot, disordered, winded, and 
trailing their few tools, he threw his helmet at his feet and kicked it, 
cursing, into the gutter. The new men gathered behind Gallegher 
and the front line of the company's old guard, and waited like school- 
boys for a disciplining, with muttered asides to one another which 
they spoke with their eyes on their feet. Pipemen shouldered through 
them, dragging hose. A water-tower almost ran them down. Shout 
answered shout around them. And when they looked up for their 
orders. Captain Meaghan stood bareheaded and raving before them, 
shaking an impotent fist at Gallegher and roaring unreportable abuse. 

Gallegher picked up his helmet for him from the gutter. The 
captain took it roughly and shambled off with it in his hand to report 
to the chief. 

The lieutenant was known as the mildest-mannered man that 
ever " rolled " to a fire. " Much more like this," he said, " and the 
old man'll blow up and bust." 

Sergeant Pim, who was biting a cud of tobacco from a com- 
panion's plug, rolled the morsel, bulging, in his lean cheek. He had 
no consolation to offer, so he gave the remainder of Parr's tobacco; 
and Gallegher accepted it with a mute nod of thanks. The occasion 
was plainly past words. 

The Torrance Building before them was nine stories in height, 
a structure of granite pillars and red brick, used as a wholesale house 
by a chemical company on the ground floor, and as an office build- 
ing in the upper stories. The fire was in the lower part of it. Al- 
ready the " deadlights " in the sidewalk had been broken in with 
axes and mauls, and a cellar pipe was spouting its stream through 
the opening into the basement. Long lines of hose stretched from 
doors and hung from windows where the smoke puffed from gaping 
sashes, and men in helmets and rubber coats appeared for a moment 
to shout reports into the disorder below them and vanish again in 
the darkness. The roof of the seven-story building adjoining was 
alive with men who were raising ladders to the burning structure. 
It did not seem to Gallegher and his company that there would be 



THE " RED-INK SQUAD '* 331 

much for No. to do. They waited — the inglorious reserve in a 
battle which they should have led — in the smoking turmoil of pulsing 
engines, the cry of orders, and the hurry of men. 

They were roused from their inaction by Captain Meaghan, who 
charged down on them like a dog on chickens, and sent them scurry- 
ing in all directions — chased Lieutenant Gallegher, Sergeant Pim, and 
two probationers, Morphy and Fuchs, to the ladders with a shout 
to open smoke- vents throughout the upper stories; ordered three of 
the old men into the basement, with a whack of his helmet on their 
shoulders and a yell at their heels, to aid the pipemen who were 
flooding the cellar ; thrust aside two others who carried axes, shouting 
at them, "You come after me"; sent Parr, "Dan Jordan," and a 
probationer named Doyle up the ladders after Gallegher's squad; 
and then crushed his mudded helmet down on his head and raced 
with the axemen for the ground floor, where a line of hose trailed 
from the black smoke of the doorway. 

That disposition of his men put the veterans of the company 
where they vveve most needed — in the cellar and on the first floor — 
to fight the fire at the fierce root of it, and it sent all the probationers 
aloft, in charge of Lieutenant Gallegher, to the less important and 
less dangerous duty of opening smoke-vents. It is with these " red- 
inkers " only that we are concerned. How the men in the cellar 
were driven back by the poisonous fume of burning chemicals, fight- 
ing in a v/ater that was knee-deep, and in a smoke that stuck like 
sulphur in the lungs; how the flames got behind Captain Meaghan 
and the two men with him, and cut off their retreat from the burn- 
ing ground floor ; how they were rescued by their comrades and taken 
unconscious to the hospital in the waiting ambulances — all this may 
not be told here. These were merely the trials of a valor that had 
been proved many times in fires not less difficult and dangerous. 
With the probationers it was a different story. 

While the battle below them was being fought and lost, they 
carried out their captain's orders to aid and relieve the engine com- 
panies manning the streams in the upper stories. They worked their 
way from the front to the rear of the building, and threw open the 
steel shutters of the back windows to let in the air and to let out the 
smoke. They found the pipemen fighting the vanguard of the fire 
that was coming up the elevator shaft. The blaze here was not dan- 
gerously large; the heat was not excessive. The only menace was 



332 THE WORKER AND HIS WORK 

the smoke; and Gallegher^ with good judgment, cried on his little 
squad against it. Being without scaling-ladders, they used the stairs, 
and worked with axe and hook-butt from the third story to the sixth, 
crashing down doors and beating out window-sashes until they had 
a clean chimney-flue for the smoke that had been stifling the pipemen 
on the floors below. 

They were on the sixth story, ignorant of what had been happen- 
ing on the ground floor, when an explosion of " back-draft '^ below 
alarmed them. Gallegher had supposed that the fire was well under 
control by this time; he had not known of the poisonous fume in the 
smoke. And the magnitude of the explosion indicated a greater 
accumulation of gas, and therefore a fiercer flame and a greater area 
of heat, than he had imagined. 

He ran to a window and hung out of it to see men sliding down 
the ladders from the second story. A huge flame spat out from the 
ground floor; and he knew from the retreat and counter-rush, the 
scurry and confusion of the crews in the street, that the fire was 
carrying all below him, and that his escape would be cut off. He 
bawled down to warn them of his danger, and then ordered his squad 
to follow him by the stairs. They groped their way back through 
the dark passages, only to come on the deadly smoke which was 
pouring up stairs and elevator shaft in advance of an unchecked fire. 
A puff of it struck them like a hand at the throat, and they dropped 
to the floor to catch the low draft of cleaner air which is always to 
be found there. It was impossible to go forward. Gallegher led 
them back at a blundering run to the window. 

One look below convinced him that they were trapped. It was 
not possible for the men in the street to put up ladders to them. 
They themselves, because of the accident to their truck, were without 
scaling-ladders or other means of escape. 

" We're up a tree," Gallegher said, soberly. 

The new men, panting from exertion and excitement, and cough- 
ing from the irritation of the smoke in their throats, grew suddenly 
quiet, staring blankly at the lieutenant and at one another. They 
looked out at the street, five stories below them, obscured in a belch 
of smoke. They heard the flames behind them singing in a fierce 
undertone in the elevator shaft. And when the Italian, " Dan Jor- 
dan," began to jabber an appeal to all the saints to save him — which 



THE " RED-INK SQUAD " 333 

the men mistook for a " Dago " profanity — they relieved their feel- 
ings in oaths of bewilderment and disgust. 

Sergeant Pirn had been too busy to remember the quid in his 
cheek. Now he chewed thoughtfully. " If we could crawl back an' 
go higher," he suggested, " there ought to be a crew on the roof." 

" There's something in that smoke," Gallegher said. " Cellar and 
first floor's full of drugs — chemical company. They're tr5dng to get 
out the men down there. They're too blame busy to do any- 
thing for us." 

Fuchs, the probationer, who had been a bridge-worker, got out on 
the window-ledge and craned his neck. 

" Too far to jump," Lieutenant Gallegher warned him. 

" Sure," he said, " but here's a three-inch ledge that ought to run 
to the next building." 

A few feet below the window-sill there was a projecting strip 
of ornamental stone facing that crossed the Torrance Building with 
a stripe of gray on the red-brick front. Pim looked down at it. 

" Think we're giddy sparrows? " he complained. 

" Dan Jordan " peeped out, and fell back from the window, wav- 
ing an unintelligible protest. 

Fuchs drew off his rubber boots. " If you'll put a hand 'tween 
my shoulders," he said to Gallegher, "I'll see how far it goes." 

The lieutenant answered: "Yes. Wait a second. Knock that 
sash in. Parr." 

Parr made a sashless gap of the window-frame with two blows 
of his axe. Fuchs swung over the sill, with Gallegher 's hand in his 
cdlar, and found the stone ledge with his toes. " All right," he said. 
" Brace yourself to hold me to the wall — and let me get as far 
as you can." 

Gallegher straddled the still — with Parr sitting on the leg that 
anchored him to the room — and gave Fuchs an arm's length, with a 
great palm spread between the probationer's shoulders. Fuchs edged 
forward, his ear scraping the bricks, until he could be certain that 
the ledge led to the windows of the next building. " All right," he 
said evenly; " it's a long stretch, but I guess we can do it," and came 
back inch by inch. " This ledge joins a sort of cornice." 

Gallegher turned to the others. *^ You do by each other what 
I do with Fuchs," he said. " Morphy'll follow me, and then Jordan, 
and then Doyle and Pim. Parr, you'll have to anchor us here till 



334 THE WORKER AND HIS WORK 

Fuchs reaches the other window. Get your boots off, men. You'll 
have to get a grip with your toes." 

" I got holes in my stockings/' Pirn said, coyly. 

The men laughed — all but " Dan Jordan." The accident to his 
chum " Spaghetti " had first broken his nerve; the blind groping in the 
darkness and the smoke, through an endless succession of bewildering 
passageways and offices, with a fire that seemed to him to be stalk- 
ing them into the dangerous upper regions of the burning building, 
had added a child's fear to this weakness; the attempt to escape 
through the choking smoke, and the sudden realization of all his 
worst fears when that attempt had failed, had put him in a panic 
terror; and now, when he saw Gallegher's preparations to climb out 
on a ledge that no man could cling to, he lost his last control of 
himself, ran to the other window of the room, and screamed wildly 
out of it, " Hel-1-lp-ah! Hel-1-lp-ah! " 

His voice cut through the uproar in the street with the shrill 
sharpness of a steam whistle. He began to yell a frightened gibber- 
ish in a voice of crazy fear. 

Parr's hand closed suddenly on his throat, choked him from 
behind, and threw him back from the window, to fall in a hysteric 
grovel on the floor. " There's a blamed fine mess," Parr said 
to Gallegher. 

The lieutenant was thinking of the effect of it on the new men. 
He prodded Jordan with his toe. " Get up," he said, sternly. 

The Italian covered his head with his hands, and wailed in his 
jargon. Gallegher kicked him in the side. *' Get up," he ordered. 
" Get up out of that." 

Jordan rolled away from him in a paroxysm of terror. The lieu- 
tenant bent down, caught his hand in the probationer's collar, and, 
raising him to his knees, shook and strangled him till he gasped for 
breath. " Get up," he said, easing his hold on him. 

The Italian sprang to his feet, broke from the lieutenant, and ran 
toward the window, screaming. Parr grappled with him. He fought 
like a madman, with wild blows that fell on Parr's face and blinded 
him so that he loosed his hold to defend himself; and the Italian, 
slipping through his arms, jumped to the sill of the window. He 
crouched there a moment, huddled up with fear, and then — whether 
it was that he lost his balance, or that he had been really driven 
out of his mind by this " fire fright " — ^just as Parr caught at his 



THE " RED-INK SQUAD " 335 

legs, he uttered a last frantic cry, and dived headlong into the street. 
They saw him fall, spread like a bat. Gallegher, with a roar of 
" Get back there! " drove the probationers from the windows before 
they saw the rest. 

He faced them. Morphy's lips were trembling. Doyle was 
laughing weakly. Parr wiped his forehead with a grimy hand. The 
lieutenant said, in a low voice: " That's what happens when a man 
loses his head." 

The noises from the street grew in their silence until Fuchs, on 
the ledge outside the window, said, reflectively: " That's like Mullen 
did on the old cantilever." And Gallegher knew from his manner 
that he could depend on one of the probationers at least. 

He tried to encourage the others. " And there was no need for 
it," he said. " There's no danger about getting out of here — not a 
bit. The same thing's been done before. There was Rush did it — 
for the matter of that — at the Manhattan bank fire. . . . Get 
your wind, now. There's no hurry." 

" No; what's the use of hurryin'? " Pim said, grimly. " Jordan's 
beat us down already." 

Morphy shuddered. He felt sick and weak; he flushed hot and 
went cold in waves; and his knees melted into tremblings. He leaned 
against the wafl. Doyle laughed brokenly at Pim. 

" PuH yourselves together, now," Gallegher said; and the pro- 
bationer's laugh choked in a catch of breath that was somewhere 
between a gulp and a sob. 

The lieutenant summed them up in a glance. " Just do what 
I tell you," he instructed them, " and don't be thinking of what 
might happen. Keep you eyes off that. See? " 

A puff of smoke warned him of approaching danger. He turned 
to the window and climbed out on the sill. " We've got our hands 
full," he said to Fuchs. "And if either of those men goes dizzy, we'll 
all go down." 

He lowered himself to a place on the narrow ledge. Fuchs, then, 
with Gallegher's arm to support him, edged out against the wall. 
The lieutenant made room on the ledge for the next comer. 
" Morphy," he said. 

Morphy came trembling over the sill, with his teeth shut on his 
nervousness. " Put your hand between my shoulders," Gallegher 



336 THE WORKER AND HIS WORK 

ordered, ignoring the man's condition, " and let me and Fuchs go 
forward as far as you can." 

Morphy said, " Yes, sir," gratefully. 

The two leaders edged forward. " Pim^s next," Gallegher said. 

With Pirn in position, the chain stretched itself inch by inch 
across the wall. The noises from the street beat up at them like the 
sound of surf at the foot of a cliff to which they were clinging. 

" A few feet more'll do it," Fuchs reported. 

Gallegher knew that he could not depend on Doyle. Morphy was 
frightened, but his pride tried to conceal it, whereas Doyle had 
laughed at his own weakness; and Gallegher knew enough of the 
psychology of fear to rate this last hysteria near the breakdown. 
*' Parr next," he ordered. 

" Parr next," Morphy repeated, huskily. 

" You're next," Pim said, in the cheerful voice of a barber to 
his customer. " Billy, if you loves me, hold me close." 

Parr spat on his hands, and lowered himself to the ledge. The 
men moved forward — Doyle in the window, holding Parr; Parr sup- 
porting Pim; Pim holding Morphy to the wall with an arm of iron; 
Morphy crushing Gallegher's broad shoulders with a pressure that 
spoke of overtense nerves; Gallegher, steadying Fuchs, and waiting 
quietly for the first signs of collapse in the man behind him. The 
smoke stung in their nostrils. The bricks scratched their perspiring 
faces. Their heels stood on nothing; and the cords of their insteps 
ached with the strain of their weight. 

" My knees are gettin' weak," Morphy said, hoarsely. 

No one answered him. Fuchs was still going forward, and Gal- 
legher's hand slid heavily across the little bridge-worker's back as 
they stretched their link of the chain to the breaking-point. The 
lieutenant felt his fingers pass from the hollow of the probationer's 
shoulders to the ridge of his shoulder-blade — felt that drawn slowly 
under his palm — felt the ball of his thumb slipping over the shoulder. 

There was a crash of broken glass. " Got my hold," Fuchs 
reported. 

He passed beyond Gallegher's reach, and they could hear him 
beating in the glass of the window with his hatchet. He came back 
to put a hand behind Gallegher. The lieutenant changed the strain 
to his other arm. 



THE " RED-INK SQUAD " 337 

" All right, now," he said to Morphy. " Fuchs's got me. You 
hold up Pirn. Tell Doyle to get out on the ledge." 

" I can't do it," Doyle said to Parr. 

" Stay there an' bum then," Parr replied, moving away. 

" Hold on," he pleaded. He clambered out, white and weak. 
" Oh, if I ever get out o' this," he said, '' it's the last the fire de- 
partment'll ever see of me." 

• Fortunately, he was on the end of the line, and Parr held him 
up. The men worked their way along with a painful cautiousness. 
" I feel like a blamed planked shad," Pim said. He was answered 
only by the hoarse breathing of Morphy. 

Fuchs was already over the window-sill. Now Gallegher fol- 
lowed him. Morphy caught the sill and clung to it. " I can't," he 
panted. " I can't lift my leg. It's par-rar-alyzed." 

Gallegher said, cheerily: " Come along, then, far enough — so's we 
can get Pim." 

Morphy's teeth were chattering. Pim came grinning to the sash. 
They dragged the probationer into the window, and he collapsed on 
the floor. " I can't stand up," he confessed, shamefacedly. " I got 
wabbles in the legs." 

They lifted Doyle in, and stood in a ring around Morphy and 
him, drawing deep breaths. " How are you, Doyle? " Galle- 
gher asked. 

" Oh, I'm out o' this game," Doyle said. " There's easier ways of 
earnin' a livin' than this." 

They did not answer him. Pim and Parr put an arm each 
about Morphy, and raised him to his feet. " I s'pose we'll have to 
carry you down," Pim said. He added, at thought of his unpro- 
tected feet; " It'll just be my luck if this place's a tack factory." 

Morphy staggered away from their support. " I'm all right," he 
said. " It was just in my legs — an' that scared me — I thought I'd 
bring you all down if I went. . . . Lord! How Jordan yelled." 

They straggled along in silence to the stairs, and were met there 
by a squad of men who had been sent to the roof to lower ropes to 
them, and had looked down to see them, through the drift of the 
smoke, clinging miraculously to the flat wall at the sixth story. A 
triumphal procession escorted them to the street. 

And that was the end of the Torrance fire, so far as the " red-ink 
squad " was concerned. Of the five probationers who had answered 
22 



338 THE WORKER AND HIS WORK 

the alarm, only Fuchs and Morphy stood with Company No. when 
the basement squad lined up with Gallegher's shoeless following at 
the neighboring bar to drink the health of the crew. " Spaghetti " 
was in the hospital. Doyle had taken himself off to his home with- 
out handing in any formal resignation. " Dan Jordan " — a ring of 
whispering men gathered around Lieutenant Gallegher, with their 
glasses in their hands, and heard of the end of him. The saloon- 
keeper came to listen to them across the bar. Gallegher saw him. 
'' To the ' red-ink squad '! " he called. 

They put their glasses to white teeth that flashed like negroes' 
in the blackness of their smoke-begrimed faces. 

" And to the fire that made them black! " Pim added — which, as 
the sequel showed, was at once a pun and a prophecy. 




By permission Metropolitan Museum 

THE THINKER, BY AUGUSTE RODIN 



THE THINKER 
By Berton Braley 

Back of the beating hammer 
By which the steel is wrought, 
Back of the workshop's clamor 
The seeker may find the Thought 
Of iron and steam and steel, 
That rises above disaster 
And tramples it under heel! 

The drudge may fret and tinker 
Or labor with dusty blows, 
But back of him stands the Thinker, 
The clear-eyed man who Knows; 
For into each plow or saber, 
Each piece and part and whole, 
Must go the Brains of Labor, 
Which gives the work a soul! 

Back of the motors humming. 
Back of the belts that sing. 
Back of the hammers drumming, 
Back of the cranes that swing, 
There is the eye which scans them 
Watching through stress and strain, 
There is the Mind which plans them — 
Back of the brawn, the Brain! 

Might of the roaring boiler, 
Force of the engine's thrust. 
Strength of the sweating toiler, 
Greatly in these we trust. 
But back of them stands the Schemer, 
The Thinker who drives things through; 
Back of the job — the Dreamer 
Who*s making the dream come true! 



From Songs of a Workaday World, by Berton Braley. Copyright, 1915, 
George H. Doran Company, Publishers. 

339 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Adams, Samuel Hopkins : The Clarion. 

Adams and Foster: Heroines of Modern Progress. 

Aldrich, Thomas Bailey : The Stillwater Tragedy. 

Allen, James Lane : The Reign of Law. 

Anonymous : The Long Day. 

Bacheller, Irving : Keeping Up With Lizzie. 

Bacon, Mary Applewhite: Who Was Her Keeper? The Problem of the 
Southern Cotton-Mill (Atlantic, 99:224). 

Bailey, L. H. : Outlook to Nature ; The Realm of the Commonplace. 

Baldwin, Charles S. : Salad (In Essays Out of Hours). 

Bangs, John Kendrick: The Booming of Acre Hill; The Enchanted 
Typewriter. 

Barr, Amelia E. : Joan ; Master of His Fate. 

Barrie, James : When a Man's Single. 

Barton, Bruce: More Power to You; The Price of a Good Job; A 
Better Job. 

Beach, Rex: The Silver Horde; The Iron Trail. 

Bell, J. J. : The Whalers. 

Bennett, Arnold: Your United States; Clayhanger; Self and Self-Man- 
agement. 

Bennett, Arnold, and Knoblauch, Edward : Milestones. 

Beymer, William Gilmore: Apathy and Steel (Harper's, March, 1909 — ). 

Blackmore, Richard: Lorna Doone. 

Blythe, Samuel G. : The Making of a Newspaper Man. 

Bond, Russell: On the Battlefronts of Engineering. 

Braley, Berton : Songs of a Workaday World. 

Bronte, Charlotte: Shirley. 

Browning, Robert : Fust and His Friends. 

Browning, Elizabeth : The Bitter Cry of the Children. 

BuLLEN, Frank Thomas : The Cruise of the Cachalot. 

Burnett, Frances H. : That Lass o* Lowrie's. 

Burroughs, John : Essays on Bees. 

Chalmers, Hugh : The Science of Selling Goods (In Collier's, April 
16, 1910). 

Churchill, Winston : The Dwelling Place of Light ; Mrs. Crewe's 
Career. 

Cobb, Irwin : The Thunders of Silence. 

Collins, Francis A. : The Wireless Man. 
340 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 341 

Connolly, James B. : The Deep Sea's Toll. 

Craik, Dinah M. : John Halifax. 

Crawford, Marion : Marietta. 

Cummins, Maria Susanna: The Lamplighter, 

Davis, Richard Harding: Gallegher. 

Davis, Rebecca H. : Life in the Iron Mills. 

Day, Holman : King Spruce. 

Dana, Richard Henry : Two Years Before the Mast. 

Deland, Margaret : The Iron Woman. 

Deland, Lorin F. : Imagination in Business. 

Dickens, Charles : Hard Times ; Barnaby Rudge. 

Disraeli, Benjamin : Sybil. 

Dodge, Henry Irving: Skinner's Dress Suit; Skinner's Big Idea. 

Donnell, Annie Hamilton : One Hundred and Oneth. 

Dupuy, William A. : Uncle Sam's Modern Miracles ; Uncle Sam, Wonder 

Worker. 
Eaton, Walter Prichard: The Idyl of Twin Fires; Green Trails and 

Upland Pastures. 
Edgeworth, Maria: Castle Rackrent; The Absentee. 
Eliot, George : Felix Holt, Radical ; Adam Bede ; Stradivarlus. 
Ferber, Edna : Fanny Herself ; Personality Plus. 
Fletcher, A. C. B. : From Job to Job Around the World. 
Freeman, Mary E. W. : The Revolt of Mother; The Portion of Labor. 
Galsworthy, John: The Inn of Tranquillity; The Freelands. 
Garland, FIamlin: They of the High Trails; Boy Life on the Prairie; 

A Son of the Middle Border. 
Gaskell, Elizabeth C. : Mary Barton. 
Gibson, Wilfrid: Livelihood; Daily Bread; Fires. 

Gill, Arthur: Some Novelists and the Business Man (Atlanic, vol. cxii). 
Grey, Zane : The Young Forester ; The Desert of Wheat. 
Griggs, Edward H. : Self-Culture Through the Vocation. 
GuNN, Mrs. ^neas: We of the Never-Never Land. 
Hale, Edward Everett : Ups and Downs ; Stories of Inventions. 
Hall, Eliza Calvert: Aunt Jane of Kentucky; Hand Woven Coverlets. 
Hallock, Mary Foote: The Chosen Valley. 
Hannay, James O. : Gossamer. 
Hardy, Thomas : Far From the Madding Crowd. 
Harris, Garrard : Joe, the Book Farmer. 
Harrison, Henry S. : V. V.'s Eyes. 
Harte, Francis Bret: Story of a Mine. 
Hauptman, Gerhardt: The Weavers. 
Harrington, H. F. : Typical Newspaper Stories. 
Hay, John : The Breadwinners. 



342 THE WORKER AND HIS WORK 

Hearn, Lafacadio : Two Years in the French West Indies. 

HowELLS, William Dean : The Rise of Silas Lapham. 

HuARD, Frances: My Home in the Field of Mercy. 

Hudson, William H. : Far Away and Long Ago. 

HuNGERFORD, Edward : The Modern Railroad. 

Husband, Joseph : A Year in a Coal Mine, 

Jackson, Helen H. : Nelly's Silver Mine ; Ramona. 

Jeans, W. T. : Creators of the Age of Steel. 

Jeffries, Richard : The Toilers of the Field. 

Jokai, Maurus : Black Diamonds, "^ 

Jordan, Elizabeth : Mary Iverson's Career. 

KiNGSLEY, Charles : Yeast ; Alton Lock, 

Kipling, Rudyard: A Walking Delegate; Day's Work; Captains Coura- 
geous; The Liner She's a Lady; The Press. 

Knoblauch, Edward: My Lady's Dress. 

Lagerlof, Selma: Lilecrona's Home. 

Larcom, Lucy : A New England Girlhood, 

Laselle, Mary A. : The Young Woman Worker, 

Laughlin, Clara E. : The Work-a-Day Girl. 

Lee, Gerald Stanley : Crowds ; The Voices of the Machines. 

Lincoln, Joseph : Cape Cod Ballads. 

London, Jack : The Call of the Wild ; The Sea Wolf. 

Longfellow, Henry W. : Keramos, 

LuMMis, Charles F, : Some Strange Corners. 

Lynde, Francis : Scientific Sprague. 

Lynn, Margaret: A Step-Daughter of the Prairie, 

Mabie, Hamilton W. : Essays on Work and Culture. 

Maeterlinck, Maurice : The Life of the Bee. 

Marshall, Archibald : The Old Order Changeth, 

McClure, S. S. : Autobiography, 

McFarland, J. Horace: My Growing Garden. 

McGregor, T, B. : The Book of Thrift, 

Masefield, John : The Story of a Round House and Other Poems ; Jim 
Davis. 

Meacham, Allen : Belle Jones. 

Meade, A. H. : When I Was a Little Girl. 

Merwin, S., and Webster, H. K. : Calumet " K," 

Merwin, Samuel: The Road Builders, 

Monroe, Kirk : Gerrick Sterling ; Prince Dusty. 

Monroe, A. S. : Making a Business Woman. 

Morgan, William de : John Vance, 

Morley, Christopher: The Haunted Book Shop; Parnassus on Wheels. 

Morris, William: News from Nowhere; The Lesser Arts of Life. 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 343 

Morris, Charles : Heroes of Progress in America. 

MuiR, John : The Story of My Boyhood and Youth. 

Munroe, John : Heroes of the Telegraph. 

Murray, David : Old Blazer's Hero ; A Capful of Nails. 

NoRRis, Frank : The Octopus ; The Pit. 

Norris, Kathleen : Mother. 

NoYES, Alfred: The Biography of William Morris. 

O'HiGGiNs, Harvey Jerrold: The Smoke Eaters. 

Onions, Oliver: Good Boy Seldom. 

Oxley, J. M. : The Romance of Commerce. 

Packard, Frank L. : The Night Operator. 

Pen NELL, Elizabeth : The Delights of Delicate Eating. 

Pennell, Joseph : Pictures of the Wonder of Work, 

Phillpotts, Eden: The Banks of Colne; Green Alleys; Brunei's Tower; 
Old Delabole. 

Poole, Ernest: The Harbor. 

Porter, William S. : The Trimmed Lamp. 

Porter, Gene Stratton : The Harvester ; The Girl of the Limberlost. 

Pyle, Joseph Gilpin : The Life of James J. Hill. 

Reade, Charles : The Cloister and the Hearth ; Put Yourself in His Place, 

Repplier, Agnes: Essays in Miniature. 

Richards, Laura E. : Life of Florence Nightingale. 

Richardson, Anna S. : Adventures in Thrift. 

Roosevelt, Theodore: The Backwoodsman. 

Rupert, Elinore: Letters of a Woman Homesteader. 

Ruskin, John: Fors Qavigera. 

ScHERER, James A. B. : Cotton as a World Power. 

ScHREiNER, Olive: Woman and Labor. 

Scully, William C. : The Odyssey of the Sockeye Salmon (Atlantic, 
August, 1916). 

Service, Robert W. : Songs of a Sourdough ; Spell of the Yukon. 

Sharp, Dallas : Hills of Hingham. 

Shaw, Anna H. : Story of a Pioneer. 

Sinclair, Upton : King Coal. 

Slater, Mary White: Jenkins (Harper's, April, 1918). 

Smith, Hopkinson : Caleb West; The Wood Fire in No. 3; Tom Grogan; 
Tides of Barnegat. 

Spearman, Frank : The Nerve of Foley and Others ; Held for Orders. 

Spencer, Ellen Lane : The Efficient Secretary. 

Stern, E. G. : My Mother and L 

Stevenson, Robert L. : Silverado Squatters. 

Stockton, Frank R. : The Casting Away of Mrs. Leeks and Mrs. Ale- 
shine. 



344 THE WORKER AND HIS WORK 

Strunsky, Simeon: The Psychology of Shopping {Harper's, vol. cxxxiv). 

Swift, Eliza Morgan : The Village Central. 

Tarbell, Ida M. : The Business of Being a Woman. 

Tarkington, Booth : The Turmoil. 

TuLLY, Eleanor Gates : The Diary of a Prairie Girl. 

Verrill, a. Hyatt: Uncle Abner's Legacy. 

Ward, Elizabeth S. P. : A Madonna of the Tubs. 

Warmen, Cy: The Story of a Railroad; The Last Spike. 

Warner, Charles Dudley : Being a Boy. 

Wells, Herbert George: Kipps, Tono-Bungay. 

White, Stewart Edward : The Riverman ; The Forest ; The Westerners ; 

Arizona Nights; Silent Places; Gold; Blazed Trail Stories. 
WiDDEMER, Margaret : Factories, with Other Lyrics. 
WiGGiN, Kate Douglas : Half a Dozen Housekeepers. 
Wilcox, Walter: Camping in the Canadian Rockies. 
Williams, Archibald: The Romance of Modern Engineering; The 

Romance of Mining. 
Williams, Jesse Lynch : The Stolen Story. 
Williamson, Mrs. C. N. : The Newspaper Girl. 
Wiltsie, Honore : Still Jim. 
WiSTER, Owen : The Virginian. 
WooDBRiDGE, ELIZABETH : More Jonathan Papers. 
Wooley, Edward Mott: The Blue Store (McClure, vol. xxxix) ; The 

Silent Voice (Scribner, vol. Ixi, p. 673). 
Wright, Harold Bell : The Winning of Barbara Worth. 



WHO'S WHO 

Rex Ellingwood Beach, novelist, was born at Atwood, Michigan, in 
1877. Some of his novels are The Spoilers, The Barrier, The Silver Horde, 
The Iron Trail His address is Lake Hopatcong, New Jersey. 

Enoch Arnold Bennett, author and journalist, was born in North 
Staffordshire in 1867. Since 1900 he has devoted himself exclusively to 
writing as a profession. Some of his well-known works are Old Wives' 
Tales, Clayhanger, Hilda Lessways, War Scenes on the Western Front, 
How to Live on Twenty-four Hours a Day, Your United States. He col- 
laborated with Edward Knoblauch in writing the play Milestones. His 
address is Comarques, Thorpe-le-Soken, England. 

Berton Braley, writer of verse, was born at Madison, Wisconsin, in 
1882. He has contributed about 5000 poems and 300 short stories and many 
articles to newspapers and magazines. Perhaps his best known volume of 
verse is Songs of a Workaday^ World. His address is 121 East 17th St., 
New York. 

Frank Thomas Bullen was an English author and lecturer. He was 
born in Paddington in 1857 and died in 191 5- He went to sea in 1869, 
serving in all parts of the world. From 1863 to 1899 he was clerk in the 
Meteorological Office ; then he began to write sea stories, the best of them 
being The Cruise of the Cachalot. Other works of his are The Cctll of the 
Deep, Lcey of a Sea Waif, and Recollections. 

Richard Eugene Burton, college professor, was born at Hartford, 
Connecticut, in 1861. He has been head of the English department in the 
University of Minnesota since 1906. He is the author of several volumes of 
verse and literary criticism. His home is at 116 Oak Grove St., Minne- 
apolis, Minnesota. 

Archie Austin Coates, poet and short-story writer, was born at 
Dayton, Ohio, in 1891. He is a graduate of Columbia University. He has 
been associate editor of the Literary Digest, Life, and the New York 
Tribune Graphic. He is a contributor to Harper's, the Saturday Evening 
Post, McClure's, Everybody's, and Poetry. He is the auhor of Odes and 
Episodes, and City Tides. His address in winter is Columbia University 
Club, New York; in summer, " Fartherside," Mohegan Lake, New York. 

Margaretta Wade Deland was born at Allegheny, Pa., February, 
1857. Some of her works are Old Chester Tales, Dr. Lavendar's People, 
The Awakening of Helena Richie, The Iron Woman. Her address is 
35 Newbury St., Boston. 

Henry van Dyke was born at Germantown, Pennsylvania, in 1852. He 
is a Presb3rterian minister and professor of English literature at Prince- 

345 



346 THE WORKER AND HIS WORK 

ton. In 1913, President Wilson appointed him minister to the Netherlands 
and Luxemburg. Some of his works are Poetry of Tennyson, Little Rivers, 
The Other Wise Man, Fisherman's Luck, and Poems. His home is at 
Avalon, Princeton, New Jersey. 

Edna Ferber was born at Kalamazoo, Michigan, August 15, 1887. She 
was a reporter on the Appleton Daily Crescent at the age of seventeen, and 
was later employed on the Milwaukee Journal and Chicago Tribune. She 
is now engaged in short-story writing for magazines. Some of her works 
are Dawn O'Hara, Buttered Side Down, Roast Beef Medium, Personality 
Plus, Emma McChesney and Co., Fanny Herself. Her address is Hotel 
Majestic, New York. 

Hamlin Garland, novelist and dramatist, was born at West Salem, 
Wisconsin, in i860. He worked on the farm, taught school, took up a 
claim in McPherson County, Dakota, but soon after he adopted writing as 
a profession. He is the author of Main-Traveled Roads, Rose of Dutchers 
Coolly, Prairie Songs, Her Mountain Lover, Boy Life on the Prairie, A 
Son of the Middle Border. His address is " The Cliff Dwellers," Chicago. 

Herschel S. Hall is a writer of short fiction, particularly of steel-mill 
stories. His address is Ashland, Ohio. 

Henry Sydnor Harrison was born at Sewanee, Tennessee, in 1880. 
Columbia University conferred a Master's degree on him in 1913. He is a 
democrat and an Episcopalian. He is the author of Queed and V. V.'s 
Eyes. His home is at Charleston, West Virginia. 

Walter Sanders Hiatt, " newspaper man," was born in Jasper, Marion 
County, Tennessee, in 1878. He was chief yeoman, U. S. N., in the Spanish- 
American War. He began newspaper work with the Morning Herald, 
Lexington, Kentucky, in 1899. He was associated with the editorial depart- 
ment of the New York Times from 1901 to 1904. He has been an extensive 
contributor to magazines on transportation subjects. In the recent war he 
represented the Associated Press with the Italian Army. His address is 
33 West 426. St., New York, care of Authors' League of America. 

Carl Holliday, college professor, was born at Hanging Rock, Ohio, 
in 1879. Since 1917 he has been head of the English department in the Uni- 
versity of Toledo, Ohio. He is a writer on literary, educational, and social 
themes, and the author of The Cotton Picker and Other Poems, The 
Literature of Colonial Virginia, and The Wit and Humor of Colonial Days. 

Peter Bernard Kyne, writer by profession, was born on a small farm 
in California in 1880, where he lived until he was seventeen. Then he 
went to the Spanish-American War. He tried the lumber business and 
newspaper work, and then finally settled into writing. His best-known 
works are Cappy Ricks, The Long Chance, Three Godfathers, and Valley 
of the Giants. He has published many short stories and articles in Sunset 
Magazine and Collier's. He lives in California. 

Edwin Lefevre, author, was born in Colon, Colombia, in 1871. He 



WHO'S WHO 347 

studied mining engineering, but has been a journalist since 1890. He is the 
author of Wall Street Stories, The Golden Floods Sampson Rock of Wall 
Street. His home is at Dorset, Vermont; his address is 7 West 43d St., 
New York. 

Joseph Crosby Lincoln, poet and short-story wrfter, was born at 
Brewster, Mass., in 1870. He is the author of Cape Cod Ballads, Cap'n 
Eri, Keziah CoMn. He lives in Hackensack, New Jersey. 

Charles Fletcher Lummis, author and explorer, was born at Lynn, 
Massachusetts, in 1859. He was graduated from Harvard. In 1884 he 
walked from Cincinnati to Los Angeles, California, by a roundabout route, 
solely for pleasure, 3507 miles in 143 days. He lived five years in the 
Indian pueblo of Isleta, New Mexico, learning Indian languages and cus- 
toms. He has explored the continent from Canada to Chile; he was 
knighed by the King of Spain in 191 5 for researches in Spanish-American 
history. He wrote A Tramp Across the Continent, and Some Strange Cor- 
ners of Our Country. His address is 200 East Ave. 43, Los Angeles, 
California. 

Margaret Lynn is a member of the English department of the State 
University of Kansas at Lawrence. She is best known for her sympathetic 
delineation of prairie life. Much of her work has appeared in the Atlantic 
Monthly. She is the author of A Step-Daughter of the Prairie and A 
Collection of Eighteenth Century Verse. 

Maurice Maeterlinck, born in 1862, is a native of Belgium. Some of his 
works are Pelleas and Melisande, Interieur, The Death of Tintagiles, The 
Blue Bird, Sceur Beatrice, Ariane et Barbebleue, He says that his recrea- 
tions are bee-keeping, canoeing, skating, bicycling, motoring. His address 
is Villa des Abeilles, Ave. des Baumettes, Nice, (A. M.) France. 

Peter McArthur, born in 1866, lives on a farm in the Province of 
Ontario, not far from London, Ontario. He has published many short 
stories and articles in The Cana/dian Magazine and a few in The Forum. 
His best-known works are In Pastures Green, and The Red Cow and Her 
Friends. An article in The Canadian Magazine, December 1915, says: Mr. 
McArthur is precisely what he pretends to be — a farmer. But he is not 
one of these college-bred, scientific agriculturists, for he introduces into 
farm Hfe a seasoning of philosophy and a fine vein of humor. He wields 
a prolific pen in a number of influential journals and has made himself 
famous through the length and breadth of Canada by telling peopl^ in a 
humorous-serious strain of the simple charms of rural life. This is 
the theme of his volume The Red Cow, which, with its appropriate and 
attractive decorative illustrations, will appeal to all lovers of farm and 
country life. 

Constantin Meunier was born near Brussels, Belgium, in 183 1, and 
died at Brussels in 1905. He was a sculptor and painter. He preferred to 
model subjects from the working classes — miners, founders, and the like— 



348 THE WORKER AND HIS WORK 

and produced a series of powerful statues, the Puddleiir, the Marteleur, 
and Le Travail, showing a central figure, Le Semeur, surrounded by four 
others, La Mine, La Moisson, Le Post, and V Industrie. 

Angela Morgan, poet and humanist, was born of New England parents, 
who removed to the Middle West when she was a child. Early in her 
life she entered upon a career of journalism and sought the fundamental 
facts of human experience, visiting police courts, jails, and the slums of 
large cities. She has produced four volumes of verse and much fiction. 
Miss Morgan has traveled extensively and given readings from her own 
poems and lectures on the poets of the day, and has been successful at 
Chautauqua as a reader and interpreter of poetry. Her books are The 
Hour Has Struck, Utterance and Other Poems, The Imprisoned Splendor, 
and Forward March! Her address is 587 Riverside Drive, New York. 

Christopher Darlington Morley is an editorial writer on the Phila- 
delphia Public Ledger. He is the author of Parnassus on Wheels, Songs 
for a Little House, Shandygaff, The Haunted Bookshop. His address is 
Wyncote, Pennsylvania. 

Benjamin Franklin Norris was born in Chicago in 1870 and died in 
San Francisco in 1902. He was educated at the University of California 
and Harvard University. He studied art in Paris, was war correspondent 
in South Africa, and also in the Spanish-American War for McClure's 
Magazine. He wrote McTague, The Octopus, The Pit, A Deal in Wheat. 
In The Pit, says Frank Taber Cooper, Norris portrays a gigantic attempt 
to corner the entire world's supply of wheat, to force it up, up, up, and 
hold the price through April, May, and June — and then finally the new crop 
comes pouring in and the daring speculator is overwhelmed by the rising 
tide, " a human insect, impotently striving to hold back with his puny hand 
the. output of the whole world's granaries." 

Eliza Calvert Hall Obenchain was born at Bowling Green, Ken- 
tucky, in 1856. She has been identified with the cause of woman suffrage 
since 1889. She is the author of Aunt Jane of Kentucky, and A Book of 
Handwoven Coverlets. Her address is Bowling Green, Kentucky. 

Harvey J. O'Higgins was born in London, Ontario, in 1876. He is 
the author of The Smoke Eaters, Old Clinkers, The Beast and the Jungle 
(with Judge Ben B. Lindsey), and Under the Prophet in Utah (with 
Frank J. Cannon). His address is Martinsville, New Jersey. 

Elizabeth West Parker was born at Woburn, Massachusetts. She 
is a student of literature, and writes, she says, occasionally. She writes: 
" Perhaps you will be interested to know that the poem Nora was written in 
memory of my dear sister who passed on several years ago. She was a 
radiant spirit, one of whom we speak smiling through our tears. She 
accepted drudgery, helped to accomplish its end in us and moved on to 
higher things." Her address is 694 Main St., Woburn, Massachusetts. 



WHO'S WHO 349 

Joseph Pennell, artist, illustrator, author, was born in Phliadelphia 
in i860. He has been the recipient of medals and honors in America and 
Europe. Among his most notable works of recent years are Pictures of 
the Wonder of Work and Pictures of War Work in America. The intro- 
ductions of these two books should be read by everyone, for few people 
have interpreted the spirit of the present age of skyscrapers and machinery 
so accurately and so profoundly as Mr. Pennell. He says : " From the 
very beginning I have cared for the Wonder of Work; from the time I 
built cities of blocks and sailed models of ships of them across the floor 
in my father's office, till I went to the Panama Canal, I have cared for the 
Wonder of Work." Mr. Pennell makes one quit regretting the past and 
deploring the present, for the present, under his influence, assumes a new 
significance. His address is the Century Club, New York. 

Elizabeth Robins Pennell (Mrs. Joseph Pennell) was born at 
Philadelphia in 1855. She has spent a good many years in Europe. She is 
the author of Our House, London Out of Our Windows, Our Philadelphia. 
Address : Care of Joseph Pennell, Century Club, New York. 

Eden Phillpotts, novelist, was born at Mount Aboo, India, in 1862. 
His father was captain of the Fifteenth Native Infantry. Phillpotts studied 
for the stage, but abandoned the art on finding that his ability did not 
justify perseverance. He wrote The Human Boy, The Human Boy and the 
War, and Portreeve. Recently he has produced four novels in which he 
has utilized great industries as backgrounds : Brunei's Tower, Old Delabole, 
Green Alleys, and The Banks of the Colne. His address is Eltham, 
Torquay, England. 

William Sidney Porter (O. PIenry) was born at Greensborough, 
North Carolina, in 1867. He spent three years on a Texas ranch, was a 
reporter in Houston, Texas, and later edited his own paper at Austin, 
Texas. Then he went to Central America, and said he "knocked around 
with the refugees and consuls." In 1902, he went to New York, and the 
remainder of his life was given to the profession of short-story writing. 
Texas gives the setting of the short stories in The Heart of the West; 
Central America is the background of Cabbages and Kings; and New York 
furnislhed the background for The Four Million, The Voices of the City, 
and The Trimmed Lamp. His death occurred in 1910. 

Lisette Woodworth Reese, author, was born in Baltimore County, 
Maryland, in 1856. She is a teacher of English in the Western High 
School, Baltimore. She is the author of several volumes of verse: A 
Branch of May, A Handful of Lavender, A Quiet Road, Wayside Lute. 
Her address is 2926 Harford Ave., Baltimore, Maryland. 

Auguste Rodin, sculptor, was born in Paris in 1840. He was educated 
in several schools of drawing, among them Borye's. He served in the 
Franco-Prussian War. Among his important works are The Broken Nose, 
The Thinker, Adam, Eve, Orpheus and Eurydice, La France. Many of 



350 THE WORKER AND HIS WORK 

these are in the Metropolitan Museum, New York. His death occurred 
November 2.7, 1917. 

James Augustin Brown Scherer, college president, was born at Salis- 
bury, North Carolina, in 1870. He has spent several years in Japan. He is 
now president of Throop College of Technology. He is the author of 
several works on Japan and economic questions. In 1916, he published 
Cotton as a World Power, a study in the economic interpretation of history. 
His address is Pasadena, California. 

Bertrand William Sinclair was born in 1878. He is Scotch by birth 
and descent, being a native of Edinburgh. His parents came to this 
country when he was eight and settled in the Canadian Northwest. As a 
boy he was associated with cow-punchers, miners, and trappers. He 
received almost no formal schooling. His best-known works are Big 
Timber and North of Fifty-Three. 

Ida Minerva Tarbell was born in Erie County, Pennsylvania, in 1857. 
She was a student in Paris at the Sorbonne and College de France. From 
1894 to 1906, she was an associate editor of McC lure's and The American 
Magazine. Some of her writings are Short Story of Napoleon, Life of 
Madame Roland, Life of Abraham Lincoln, The History of the Standard 
Oil Company, The Business of Being a Woman. Her home is at 132 East 
19th St., and her office at 381 Fourth Ave., New York. 

Hereert George Wells was born at Bromley, September 21, 1866. He 
is an English writer of romances dealing chiefly with imaginary future 
scientific results. Among the best known of his works are 7^ he War of the 
Worlds, Kipps, In the Days of the Comet, New Worlds for Old, Tono- 
Bungay, and Mr. Britling Sees It Through. His address is Easton Glebe, 
Dunmow, Essex. His London address is 52 St. James Court, S. W. 

Stewart Edward White, born at Grand Rapids, Michigan, in 1873, 
is a graduate of the University of Michigan and the Columbia Law School. 
He is a writer of stories and novels of forestry, lumbering, and western 
life. Some of his works are The Blazed Trail Stories, The Westerners, 
The Silent Places, The Riverman. His address is Santa Barbara, California. 

Elizabeth Woodbridge (Mrs. Charles Gould Morris), author, was 
born at Brooklyn in 1870. She is a graduate of Vassar and the author of 
several works of literary criticism. She has contributed essays to the 
Atlantic Monthly, the Outlook, and other maagzines. She wrote The Drama 
— Its Law and Its Technique, The Jonathan Papers, and More Jonatham 
Papers. Her home is at 230 Prospect St., New Haven, Connecticut. 

Harold Bell Wright was born in Oneida County, New York, in 1872. 
He has followed many professions, having been painter and decorator, 
landscape painter, minister and author. He wrote That Printer of Udell's, 
The Shepherd of the Hills, The Winning of Barbara Worth. His address 
is Holtville, California. 



